The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century
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- Author: Unknown
Highlights
The continuing tension in the relations between criticism and literature and doubt about whether critical prose can be literature—whether it can have artistic value as well as social utility—are legacies from the Romantic era. Hazlitt wondered self-consciously in an essay on criticism whether his was not in fact a critical rather than a poetical age and whether “no great works of genius appear, because so much is said and written about them.” — location: 1176
the tension between literature and criticism is emerging.
This theatrical culture’s demotion of words might explain why the poets of the era, however stagestruck, found drama uncongenial. Nonetheless, almost all tried their hands at the form, tempted by the knowledge that the plays of certain of their (now less esteemed) contemporaries—Hannah Cowley and Charles Maturin, for example—had met with immense acclaim. — location: 1209
The congenial relationship between the poet and the words they use. - explains why they write in poetry instead of resorting to visual effects of the theatrical spectacles.
His powerful tragedy The Cenci (1820), the story of a monstrous father who rapes his daughter and is murdered by her in turn, was deemed unstageable on political rather than artistic or technical grounds. It had no chance of getting by the Examiner of Plays; indeed, by thematizing the unspeakable topic of incest, Shelley predicted his own censoring. — location: 1218
Can this be regarded as a Promethean act - know the peril in advance but nonetheless embrace the fate of censor and unpopularity.
Shelley established his characteristic procedure of working with multiple perspectives. Both preface and poem explore alternative and conflicting possibilities in what Shelley calls “doubtful knowledge”— matters that are humanly essential but in which no certainty is humanly possible. — location: 17404