Author: John Richard Rooney

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

Reading a ghostly company of lyric and epic poetry, treatises on aesthetics and poetics, manuals of technical prosody, and works of occult speculation across one and a half centuries, "The Phantoms of a Thousand Hours" argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and poetic theorists seize on the ghost as the inchoate form of poetry itself. Beginning in the pious meditations of the eighteenth-century "Graveyard School," these writers spectralize the operations of the poem and fashion poetic structures into chambers of vigil where the ghost might be awaited and encountered. Alive to the recursive directions of contemporary historical poetics, this study challenges the emerging scholarly consensus on the ghost in the long nineteenth century as either a creature of fiction, born almost coeval with the novel in the work of Defoe, or a residual form, a remainder from folklore and oral balladry that glides uncertainly into Gothic's set dressing. Rather, just as poets envisioned their craft as instinct with ghostly measures, rhythms, and pauses, occult writers from antiquaries to Spiritualists substantialized and realized the ghost through the opaque lyricism and manifest technique of poetry. Accepting neoformalism's sound insistence on the historicity of form itself, my work nonetheless eschews New Formalism's frequent dismissal of the specter from the spectral: even the most evanescent, technical traces of the ghost in the poetry of the long nineteenth century recall and reflect living structures of preternatural belief and occult vision. Like Shelley in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," these poets "sought for ghosts," and, if they were "not heard" and "saw them not," they could yet take solace in "the phantoms of a thousand hours," of the myriad ideal visions of poetry's ghosts across a long Graveyard Century. Across the Graveyard Century spanning from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy, this study argues that the ghost haunts poetry's sense of its own form precisely because poetry's labors of defining itself, through poetics, through technical prosody, and through its affinities of spirit with the occult, are, like the labors of the ghost itself, fated to end unfulfilled. As each a form of unfinished life, neither the nineteenth century's poetry nor the nineteenth century's ghost is ever wholly read by living eyes.