(DOWNLOAD) "Budgets and Brownings: The Function of Poetry at the Present Time." by Victorian Poetry # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Budgets and Brownings: The Function of Poetry at the Present Time.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 183 KB
Description
There is a crisis in poetry. There is a crisis in Victorian poetry. At least according to much that has been said of late about the future of verse. PMLA recently sought submissions for a special issue on poetry, asking, "has the time come to revisit the relevance of poetry and the pleasures of the poetic text in this changed interpretive universe?" and questioning "the possibilities of aesthetic analysis after deconstruction." A recent call for papers for a conference on the future of Victorian poetry notes "gloomy prognostications about the academic future of poetry in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular." No other literary form that I know of seems to generate this apocalyptic rhetoric, doubtless because poetry, perhaps unlike prose, loses much if it loses its aesthetic capital. Poetry's relevance and survival are ongoing concerns, as many Victorians themselves thought the fate of Western civilization to turn in large measure upon the question of verse. While Matthew Arnold prescribed the "sweetness and light" of culture as the tonic for a society sick with philistine utility, Lord Macaulay provocatively declared in his essay on Milton, "we think that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines." If poetry has survived utilitarianism and industrialism, can it survive in the wake of theory or post-theory? More important, can it weather the downsizing, utilitarian university and a student population unequipped to encounter "poetry in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular"? I would not be writing this article, nor would you be reading it, if most of us were not prepared to answer "yes." To convince others to answer in the affirmative, I hope to profile some trends in the study of Victorian verse and to sketch out new scholarly dimensions grounded in the classroom, where the future of Victorian poetry, like that of the rest of the liberal arts, lies. I shall keep in the background of this academic profile the following practical concerns: the survival of Victorian poetry classes amid shrinking budgets and enrollments; the ongoing crisis in the job market; and the enduring problems of reading, difficulty, and rigor in our ever-changing classrooms. Three broad areas of scholarship address these concerns--the cultural status of poetry, its forms and genres, and its academic history.