"Dark inscrutable workmanship" : rereading mystery through riddle in the visionary poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- It is a paradox of the Romantic imagination that the source of poetic power is a mystery beyond the poet's reach. While the paradox has been explicated as a metaphysical problem reflected in the corpus of major Romantic poets, this dissertation models a different interpretive methodology that renders the existential predicament analytically accountable within the poem itself, in order to provide a new understanding of how Romantic visionary poetry works. To this end, it departs from the cosmological drama most commonly studied as visionary poetry, and analyzes instead three poems on the quest for vision: William Wordsworth's The Prelude, Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Alastor, " and John Keats's The Fall of Hyperion. While the poems concern an impossible quest for a transcendent power by definition beyond the poet's grasp, reading them as riddlic quest poems reveals that each poem's vision is double: at the farthest reach of mystery, another, literal meaning stealthily arises. The quester's fervent attempt to peer through the dark mirror produces even deeper enigmas, but the reflections in the dark mirror itself yield unexpected insight into the nature of the quest. I argue that scenes of mystery in Romantic visionary poetry contain the structure of the riddle, in which one reads the unknown in terms of the known, so that the appearance of mystery can be read as a special kind of appearance— and thereby, the very mystery that seems to lock us out can lead us in. My broader argument about the genre is that the most emphatic layer of Romantic visionary poetry —the one whose ardent assertion of visionary power (or its inverse, visionary despair) aims straight for our spiritual throats— is also the one that the poem's own structure impels us to see through. Rather than a demystifying reading that reveals the poem as less than what it seemed, however, my reading shows how the poems are more than what they seem, by unfurling the full depth of meaning invested in the adverb through. Therefore, if the first power of the riddle is to lead us into the mystery, its second power is how it leads us out of it. The project takes the riddle as an enabling possibility for approaching the mystery in each individual poem, in order to discern structures that render the most mysterious passages inescapably accountable to the poem, to bridge the two normally opposed senses of vision —a glimpse at a realm beyond, or outlook on the one we occupy— and finally to develop a renewed understanding of the Promethean quest at the heart of Romantic visionary poetry
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Noble, Julia Jade |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Vermeule, Blakey |
| Degree committee member | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Degree committee member | Vermeule, Blakey |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Julia Jade Noble |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Julia Jade Noble
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