|
|
Article: The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style.(Review)
- Article from:
- Criticism
- Article date:
- March 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Wayne State University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style by Jerome McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. 228. $19.95 paperback.
In 1956, Northrop Frye called for a new approach to the poetry composed between Pope and Wordsworth. Dubbing this era an Age of Sensibility, he sought to appreciate the liveliest poets of the late eighteenth century--his chief examples were Ossian, Smart, and Blake--according to their own poetics and not as laggard Augustans or precocious Romantics. This meant, for Frye, a valuing of sound over sense, of artificiality over naturalness, of free association over narrative. The Augustan and Romantic eras were, for all their ...