Unfettering Poetry : Fancy in British Romanticism

This book calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century.

In Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism, Jeffrey C. Robinson argues that politically progressive Romantic poets write with a politically progressive or radical poetics, coded during the Romantic Period as "the Fancy." Traditional readings of Romantic poetics that emphasize the drama of the speaker or lyric subject reveal a pervasive "fanciphobia," or fear of the Fancy''s inclination for a poetry of inclusiveness, expansiveness, and visionary transformation of the object or "the world," and of an experimentation with and unfettering of poetic form and content. In fact, Robinson locates a poetry of the Fancy as the bedrock of Romantic poetic intention (having resonances in the experimental poetries of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries), with extended readings of the relatively unexplored poetry of Robinson, Hunt, Reynolds, Clare, and Hemans, as well as a radical rethinking of the familiar poetry of Wordsworth and Keats.