Unfettered Poetry ― Fancy In British Romanticism

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.

Jeffrey C. Robinson has published widely in Romantic Studies since his first book Radical Literary Education: A Classroom Experiment with Wordsworth’s Ode in 1987. Other works include: The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (1989), The Current of Romantic Passion (1991), and Reception and Poetics in Keats: My Ended Poet (1998). He has also engaged Romantic poetry and poetics through the genres of original lyric essays, diary, and poetry in, for example, Romantic Presences (1995), Spliced Romanticism (1997), and, most recently, Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Work into Poetry Now (2005). He is co-editor, along with Jerome Rothenberg, of the forthcoming Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry. A winner of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, Jeffrey Robinson has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, since 1971. In 2003 he won the Hazel Barnes Prize, the highest award given to a faculty member at the University of Colorado for excellence in research and teaching.