What's the Import?

Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice

Kerry McSweeney

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780773532021
• eBook ISBN: 9780773578647
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Kerry McSweeney critiques such readings of Romantic, Victorian, and 19th-century American poems. In What's the Import? he proposes and exemplifies an aesthetic or intrinsic critical model rooted in literary-historical contextualization that considers the determination of meanings to be only one of the qualities that full engagement with a poem requires. His wide-ranging study discusses poems by Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Carroll, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Hopkins, Hardy, and the Michael Field poets. What's the Import? contributes to the current debates in North America about the state and direction of English studies and the teaching of literature in general.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Performing “The Solitary Reaper” and “Tears, Idle Tears”
• 3. Victorian Poems on Paintings
• 4. Indefinitiveness of Meaning in Parabolic Poems
• 5. Aesthetic and Ethical Value in Bigg’s “An Irish Picture”
• 6. The Cruxes of Whitman’s “The Sleepers”
• 7. Grief as a Lyric Subject in Dickinson
• 8. Hopkins’ Godless Poems
• 9. Influence and Resistance in Hardy’s Poetry
• 10. Afterword: Two Browning Poems
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index