This second case study of Part I focuses on the English Parnassian revival, and, specifically, on Gleeson White’s definitive anthology of Parnassian poetry (featuring poets such as Graham R. Tomson, W. E Henley, John Payne and A. Mary F. Robinson). The chapter argues for the strict metrical structures of the Parnassian poet as engaging not in a nostalgia for a secure and orderly ideal of the past, but with the machine and commodity rhythms and forms of the ‘second’ industrial revolution. This engagement with the past in fact a means of engaging with the present. Ultimately asking what kind of historicism the new Parnassians were practicing in their borrowing of medieval French forms, the chapter finds models that speak to Benjaminian, post-Enlightenment, ideals, and move lyric away from the older, Hegelian lyric temporalities.
Technology and Geography in the Second Industrial Revolution: New Evidence from the Margins of Trade
