TELLING TALES ABOUT GENRE: POETRY IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

Nowadays, you can often spot a work poetry by whether it's in lines or no; if it's in prose, there's a good chance it's a poem. While there is no lesson in line more useful than that picket line, line that has caused most adversity is bloodline . . . Charles Bernstein, Of Time and Line.(1) In a 1794 review Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries Udolpho, Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes notice one novel's charming pieces original poetry. He reprints it because, as he says, poetical beauties have not a fair chance being attended to, amidst stronger interest inspired by such a series adventures.(2) His admonishing review Matthew Lewis' The Monk similarly concludes with a poem excerpted from novel: this exquisitely tender elegy . . . will melt and delight heart, when ghosts and hobgoblins shall be found only in lumber-garret a circulating library.(3) Coleridge's fears for fate poetry, written into his reviews these novels, articulate two major interests this paper: critic's desire to construct narratives and contexts for particular genres, and means by which poetry, and novel in late eighteenth century arose to contrast, complement, and define each other's aims.(4) My interest, therefore, is not simply how critic-- especially romantic but also poststructuralist critic--does or does not locate a genre or a text in a history. A number recent critics, including Jerome McGann, Clifford Siskin, and Alan Liu, have already demonstrated difficulties inherent in such a gesture, given criticism's participation in a romantic version history which itself performs a mimetic denial history.(5) These critics, course, do not expressly address themselves to genre criticism or history genres; nevertheless, Coleridge, they are engaged in a sort genre construction, singling out moments--the romantic poems--which overwrite our imaginings history.(6) According to McGann and Siskin, romantic especially as it has developed from a Wordsworthian poetics, guides our reading toward a turn away from history.(7) We have been taught to subordinate conflicts history to structures individual consciousness provided by romantic lyric. Sounding a similar note, Liu contends that rhetoric new historicism and cultural studies repeats sublimation history at work in, for instance, Lyrical Ballads, by virtue a romantic interest in detail which inevitably devolves into a moment local transcendence. There is a whole subgenre in cultural criticism, complains Liu, of sustained and egregiously adventitious uses romanticism--gorgeous insets romantic consciousness so well wrought, so self-sustaining, that we wonder whether cultural criticism is at last Keats's Grecian Urn.(8) Criticism, especially when it tries to accommodate grand alterity historical circumstance, writes something like a poem.(9) My interest lies more in a phenomenon that inverts terms these critics' readings and returns us to occasion Coleridge's reviews. What do we make imagined histories--fictions--that determine our under standing poem? More specifically, how do we read poems inserted into narratives romantic novels? On one side we have Coleridge's chivalric response to appearance poems in novel: he wants to protect fragile beauty from adventures fiction and circulation. Poetry requires critic's attention and intervention so that it can be presented to public, its virtue intact, its value undiminished. On another side we have accusatory posture current criticism takes toward lyricism in its histories: turn is a seductive, gorgeous ploy that betrays history itself Jay Clayton, in his study Romantic Vision and Novel, invokes this latter response when he finds poetic moments disrupting classical English novel: in those cases, the dangerous allure lyric threatens to damage narrative form and thereby ethical concern fiction. …