(Download) "American Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic (Analysis of Michael Cohen's Essay)" by Victorian Poetry # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: American Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic (Analysis of Michael Cohen's Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 193 KB
Description
IN A SPEECH GIVEN AT A FORMAL DINNER IN 1868 FOR SAMUEL BREESE MORSE (THE American portrait painter who invented the electric telegraph), William Cullen Bryant began by speaking "in behalf of the press" as a New York City newspaper editor and ended by giving a bravura performance of the transatlantic imaginary he had become famous for as a poet. "My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea," Bryant mused, As a member of the press, Bryant stressed the telegraph's speed of transmission; as a poet, Bryant transfigured electric cable into a lyric impulse, a "mystic wire" that "vibrates to every emotion" on both sides of the Atlantic, a fantasy of "living human presence" where there is none, "currents of human thought" circulating around the detritus of culture and nature alike. This poetic notion is the real communicator: an idea of expression much more capacious than expression itself, however transmitted; not the news itself but the vibrating cords that will unite nations, that will affectively perform "the welfare of the human race" that (alas) over-water politics may have failed to sustain. (2) As the essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, Bryant's fantastic elaboration of this transatlantic poetic was symptomatic of what we now call "Victorian Poetry"--a phrase coined in New York rather than in London, and one which now finds itself strung not only between continents, but between notions of "poetry" that themselves seem whimsical responses to the technology of modernity: colorful, humanistic, and (already, in 1868) somewhat pathetically out of date.
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