Michael J. Neth

Middle Tennessee State University

Bysshe Coffey’s Shelley’s Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley’s heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and “limit-points” of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody―in the domain of the “[i]ntermittent states of being, vacancies, suspensions, strange immaterial formulations, [and] tenuous and porous networks” that “lace throughout his poetry” (8); and one part close reading of individual passages in several poems, carefully chosen to reinforce the author’s central insight that “intermittence is a pervasive quality not only of [Shelley’s] prosody but of the incidents his verse describes” (8). Coffey argues that Shelley’s “fascination with the voice, breath, and its repertoire of effects” enables him “to transgress the confines of the present and tangible object, to chart and animate...

Matt ffytche

University of Essex

Wordsworth says, “. . . hearing often-times the still, sad music of

humanity” [“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”].

We are supposed to be in contact with our fellow human beings.

When you give an interpretation tomorrow, are you sure that it will

approximate to expressing the music of humanity or the little bit of it

which has got into your consulting-room?

Wilfred Bion, The Italian Seminars, The Complete Works of W.R. Bion, ed Chris Mawson (Karnac, 2014), vol IX, p. 166

Many contemporary psychoanalysts think of the unconscious not as a fixed entity with certain inherent conditions, but more as an opportunity. As with the invention of negative numbers, the right question to ask is not ‘Do they really exist?’, but: what are the new mental transactions such terms enable? What different narratives do they allow us to present concerning...

Joel Faflak

University of Western Ontario

          One of the most powerful statements in Romanticism is Demogorgon’s speech at the end of Act Four of Prometheus Unbound, which entreats us “to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (4.573-74). Earlier criticism took this as an injunction to wage creative resilience and resistance against sociohistorical adversity. This view tended to elide or ignore gender, sexual, racial, and class differences, an indifferent politics of imagination Romantic studies since worked hard to redress. More often than not such field reconstructions reflect their sociohistorical moment. But Romanticism in particular holds up and holds itself up as a rather uncanny mirror of whatever future our present demands. Shelley predicted as much at the end of A Defence of Poetry. But there’s the catch. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, the future is always avenir. It never exists except as it...

Kacie L. Wills

Illinois College

Samantha Matthews begins Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (Oxford UP, 2020) with a definition of what she terms “albo-mania” or the “collective enthusiasm, usually short-lived” for the album in the 1820s and 1830s. As with other manias, Matthews alludes to the inherent disorder, the “excess” and “pathological passion” this term incites. In its efforts to recuperate album poetry, Matthews’ book examines the personal and institutional, the fashionable and pathological, the amateur and professional, the creative and authentic, and, ultimately, the complicated gender dynamics that characterize the album in this period. In her examination of these various facets of “albo-mania,” Matthews seeks to debunk the assumption that album poetry is “bad” poetry, that it is unoriginal and derivative in its form and content. Instead, Matthews suggests, album poetry is “distinctive and...