“Admire and Do Otherwise”

Gerard Manley Hopkins had a powerful impact on Ivor Gurney, who had poems by Hopkins with him in the WWI trenches. Gurney epitomizes the dramatic change from nineteenth-century poetry to Modernism, and this change was fundamentally influenced by the example of Hopkins. While Gurney did not mimic Hopkins’s mannerisms or take on his themes, from Hopkins he learned to harness and hold expansive energy within his own eccentric forms. In so doing, Gurney set a pattern for later writers responding to Hopkins.

Introduction

This Introduction describes the presence and absence of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, both then and now; situates this book’s approach and method within the field of feminist recovery work, looking closely at the central role that subjectivity has played in past efforts to define the field; and explains how and why a study of conventions can provide a necessary intervention at this moment in nineteenth-century poetry studies. It articulates an argument for why the field should turn away from what is exceptional (namely, a study of individual women writers) and towards what might be seen as commonplace (namely, the conventions that those women employed).

Marvell and Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Influence always leaves a wraith-like path, invisible to one person, transparent to another. The danger of reading-in is evident. This chapter proposes that Marvell’s influence on nineteenth-century poetry is manifold but frequently fugitive, now like centrifugal ripples in a still pond, now a sudden shower of meteors across the night sky. Nigel Smith reminds us that ‘The important point to remember is that Marvell was not unrecognized as a poet until the later nineteenth century, as has often been claimed’. Poets from Wordsworth to Tennyson are studied in relation to the nuanced ambivalence of Marvellian poetry; so too are critics and anthologists; so too is the range of poetic genres affected by Marvell’s influence.