Studies the relationship between nineteenth-century poetry and liberal philosophy.
Discusses nineteenth-century poets as readers of philosophy and explore the peculiar capacity of poetry to act as a medium for liberal thought and expression
Offers an original and significant contribution to the field of nineteenth-century studies in its in-depth study of liberalism's forming influence on a range of poets from the Romantic period to the last decades of the century
This book explores the relationship between nineteenth-century poetry and liberal philosophy. It carries out a reassessment of the aesthetic possibilities of liberalism and it considers the variety of ways that poetry by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Algernon Charles Swinburne responds to and participates in urgent philosophical, social and political debates about liberty and the rule of law. It provides an account of poetry¿s intervention into four different sites where liberalism has a stake: the self, the university, married life and the nation state and it seeks to assert the peculiar capacity of poetry to articulate liberal concerns, proposing poetic language as a means of liberal enquiry.
"Approach to liberalism constitutes at once the book's main liability and its greatest strength. ? nineteenth-century poets engaged with the progressive social thought of their day not only when they addressed it directly but in all their poems, even the most apparently private. Barton's often revelatory new formalist analyses compellingly demonstrate the real intellectual work that poetry can perform." (Erik Gray,The Review of English Studies, Vol. 70 (293), February, 2019)
