‘A Precarious Gift’
This chapter (along with those following) concerns reception, broadly conceived, beginning with the Romantic reception of classical and early modern commonplaces about poetic madness. The chapter examines the status of earlier topoi such as the furor poeticus and the vesanus poeta in the Romantic period, by looking at the way in which these topoi were handled or discussed in the period. Subjects include Plato’s dialogue Ion, via Coleridge’s notebooks and Shelley’s Platonic translations, the Aristotelian Problems, Byron’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, and figurations of Renaissance melancholy in Ficino, Robert Burton, and Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, as they were discussed by Romantic writers, especially Coleridge in his influential lectures on the play.