Brian Wilkie
Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition.
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1965. First edition. x/276 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in yellow cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book shows light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Pages display occasional underlining and marginalia, almost entirely in pencil, by Cornell professor S. M. Parrish (1921-2012), a noted Wordsworth scholar and general editor of the "Cornell Wordsworth." His letter, dated 24 March 1965, accepting offer to review this book, is laid in. Dust jacket, with price of $6.50 on front flap, shows light shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"The English Romantic poets have frequently been considered innovators who reacted rebelliously against the values of and poetic forms of the past. Mr. Wilkie throws new light on the subject in his treatment of several important Romantic poems. Without denying the Romantics' originality, he shows that they did not simply reject or ignore the epic as obsolete; rather, they needed and used its traditions as a measure both of their allegiance to the past and of their attempts to transcend it. Epic had been in the past the poet's way of setting forth new values, new heroic codes, new ideas. But scholars have often argued that the nineteenth-century poet rejected the epic in favor of a more exclusively personal and informal kind of poetry. Mr. Wilkie demonstrates conclusively that this was not the case. He shows that the English Romantic poets saw their new codes as authentically heroic and their new themes as fit matter for epic treatment -- as, "in truth, heroic argument.""