(DOWNLOAD) "Manifest Prosody (Essay)" by Victorian Poetry * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Manifest Prosody (Essay)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 189 KB
Description
Like many nineteenth-century American writers, Sidney Lanier--poet, critic, professional flutist, Confederate soldier, and professor of English at Johns Hopkins--looked eastward toward Great Britain while commenting on and contributing to the American literary scene. Lanier's identification with English tradition embraces the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, and specifically the popular nineteenth-century fantasy described by Reginald Horsman whereby white Americans imagined their supposed Anglo-Saxon origins as proof of being "a chosen people with an impeccable ancestry." (1) Writing from Baltimore, Maryland, in 1879, Lanier thus explores "the remarkable ease with which our English idioms run into the mould of the sonnet." (2) In an essay on Anglo-Saxon poetry published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly, Lanier exhorts the "strong, bright, picture-making tongue we had in the beginning of the sixteenth century when the powerful old Anglo-Saxon had fairly conquered all the foreign elements into its own idiom" (CE, 4:293; italics mine). Identifying here with that Anglo-Saxon tongue, a tongue that in the creation of its own distinct sounds and cadences had pushed out the foreign-and, later in the same paragraph, the alien--Lanier positions both himself and his American readers as English linguistic subjects, the inheritors of an AngloSaxon cultural and literary heritage. In what follows, I argue that Lanier's move to elide the American with the early English, a move consistent throughout his prosodic and poetic writings, was an especially significant gesture in post-Civil War America. Much in the way that, as Foucault has shown, European nations throughout modern history have endeavored to trace their origins to the fall of Troy, thereby "guarantee[ing] a link of genealogical kinship with ancient Rome" and its "great unity ... great strength ... [and] great legitimacy," (3) so Lanier constructs an American cultural genealogy firm in its English roots. Somewhat counterintuitively, Lanier suggests that the United States might best fortify itself against the foreign and alien through an exclusionary literary tradition whose origins ought be traced back to England. In both his prose criticism and his poetry, then, Lanier transports English metrical traditions to American soil, casting a backward glance toward the Old World as he sings his own imagined future for the West.
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