Check out my final paper by clicking on the above picture.
I chose focus on Susan Wolfson's "Formal Charges, The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism" with John Keats and his poetry. Wolfson's text tackles the "Big 6" Romantic authors with Formalism and New Historicism. In her essay on Keats, "Teasing Form", Wolfson shows how an author's biographical life is indeed a component in "fitting feeling into form" (the idea that an ode is written in the form of an ode for a reason).
This project's aim is to demonstrate how Wolfson views Keats' writings as "fitting feeling into form". Once illustrated, this critique will be compared and contrasted with the viewpoints of others (namely Stuart Curran and Jerome McGann) to show if the literary critique of Formalism is indeed the richest form in which to read Keats' lyric poems. By showing this, I hope to enable readers of Keats to gain a new, much deeper appreciation for his works - if not embraced, at least a new experience and perspective.
I was introduced to Susan Wolfson's "Formal Charges" last semester and I had always been intrigued by her viewpoint of the "Big 6" writing out of "strange fits of passion", so to speak. Wolfson has said that John Keats has "the ability to set aside his fears and apprehensions in order to let the text speak for itself" (Wolfson, 164). Her major idea pertains to the 3 major points of separation when reading poetry - the fact that one must think of 3 totally separate entities when reading a text. They are; the poet (their life, past, the experiences that have shaped them), the poem (the written word, its possible meanings), and the reader (their influences, and the meaning they apply). I focus primarily on Keats' "Ode to Fanny" to exemplify this application.
Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. New York : Oxford University Press, 1986.
McGann, Jerome. Romantic Ideology: a critical investigation. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1983.
Wolfson, Susan. Formal Charges, The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1997.
Wolfson, Susan and Peter Manning. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2A: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.
Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers. New York : Harcourt, Brace & World [1967] (anthology)
Wolfson, Susan. Formal Charges, The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1997. (bibilography in back of book)
