(DOWNLOAD) "Winking Through the Chinks: Eros and Ellipsis in Robert Browning's "Love Among the Ruins"." by Victorian Poetry # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Winking Through the Chinks: Eros and Ellipsis in Robert Browning's "Love Among the Ruins".
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 232 KB
Description
In 1798, and with a spooniness of which not many Victorians would ever consider him capable, Thomas Malthus celebrated love at its most pure as that culminating glory which "scarcely a man who has once experienced [it]" does not regard "as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask." (1) Over the course of the nineteenth century, the quantity and popularity of lyric verse that seemed to hold out the hope of just such a basking in the sunshine of pure love increased as if in geometrical progression. Another type of poem, however, might cast a doubtful or disfiguring shadow over Malthus' sunny spot. Which type of poem we are reading may not be made plain until the poem's own point of culmination is reached. The end becomes the place from which the poem starts. Almost a century before T. S. Eliot took up the theme, "The end is where we start from" became the poetic watchword of Edgar Allan Poe. In his essay of 1846 on "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe argued that "the end" was where "all works of art should begin." (2) The back-to-front bias of Poe's argument was bound to create keen interest in the nature and function of the final lines of works. It especially encouraged that kind of concluding line which can be perceived as growing logically out of the title of the work--resuming, reaffirming, extending. In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne would end The Scarlet Letter with just such a line: "'ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.'" (3) Soon afterward, Robert Browning would end "Love Among the Ruins" (the poem that stood at the beginning of his 1855 collection Men and Women) with what looked like another: "Love is best." (4)