Life: Organic Form and Romanticism
Denise Gigante
Abstract
What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates matter to act the way it does. Yet vitality in its very unpredictability often appears as a threat. This book explores how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form, often finding themselves face to face with a power known as monstrous. The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed i ... More
Keywords: life, matter, vitality, Romantic period, art, biological form, vital power, poetry, organic form, literary studies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 | Print ISBN-13: 9780300136852 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013 | DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300136852.001.0001 |
