[Download] "Fluttering on the Grate: Revision in "Frost at Midnight"." by Studies in Romanticism " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Fluttering on the Grate: Revision in "Frost at Midnight".
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 195 KB
Description
WHILE EXAMINING THE PROOFS OF SIBYLLINE LEAVES IN 1817, SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge found Frost at Midnight in an unexpected place, the section of "Poems Occasioned by Political Events or Feelings Connected with Them." In addition to providing his publisher with a substantially revised version of the text itself, Coleridge also insisted on relocating the poem within the volume: "How comes this Poem here? ... It must, however, be deferred till it[s] proper place among my domestic & meditative Poems." (1) The new position accorded to "Frost at Midnight" in Sibylline Leaves, as the final piece in the section of "Meditative Poems in Blank Verse," anticipates the poem's subsequent reputation. Critics have often taken it to be the culmination of Coleridge's achievement in his most influential lyric form, the conversation poem. Coleridge's preference aside, an incisive critical revaluation, begun in the early 1990's, has sought to re-emphasize the poem's political contexts. As Paul Magnuson has reminded us, "Frost at Midnight" was first published in 1798, concluding a quarto that also features "Fears in Solitude" and "France: An Ode." Like the other poems in this volume, Magnuson argues, "Frost at Midnight" responds to the repressive political climate that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. (2) Much of the recent commentary on the poem follows Magnuson's lead in renewing attention to the circumstances surrounding the poem's inception. Judith Thompson has elucidated the significant exchanges between "Frost at Midnight" and John Thelwall's poems of the 1790's; Jerrold E. Hogle has explored the poem in terms of Coleridge's vexed attitude to the Gothic vogue of the late eighteenth century. (3) These studies have proven valuable by reinvigorating our sense of "Frost at Midnight" as a conversation poem, as a text intricately engaged with the broad social and cultural questions of its day.