Turning and Burning: Sentimental Criticism, Casabiancas, and the Click of the Cliché
This chapter explores the relationship between suspended spheres and interdisciplinary poetic reading, drawing on popular and pedagogical writing that invites reflection on patriotic fantasies' relations to post-Victorian processes of reading—and unreading—sentimental poetic texts. It first analyzes Virginia Woolf's “The Works of Mrs. Hemans,” which not only presents learning to unread sentimental poetry as an educational rite of passage, but encourages the cultivation of part comic, part courtly, part anxious visions of naïve and sentimental readers. It then considers Felicia Dorothea Hemans's “Casabianca” and compares it to Elizabeth Bishop's “Casabianca,” arguing that consent to the patriotic Poetess terrors of Hemans may well serve as prerequisite for rendering the terrifying critical and political as well as poetic achievement of Bishop's modernist elegy fully legible. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the New York Times' volume Portraits: 9/11/01; The Collected “Portraits of Grief”.