Description
Book SynopsisLiterary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated late-Romantic poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the fundamental continuities between Romanticism's poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late-nineteenth-century to the present day. According to editors July Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, active romanticism is a poetic response, direct or indirect, to pressing social issues and an attempt to redress forms of ideological repression; at its core, active romanticism champions democratic pluralism and confronts ideologies that suppress the evidence of pluralism. Poetry fetter'd, fetters the human race, declared poet William Blake at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other statement from the era of the French Revolution marks with such tersen
