Fossil Poetry : Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins. Cover......Page 1 Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Acknowledgements......Page 8 Contents......Page 12 Introduction: Fossil or Root? Anglo-Saxon and the Origin and Descent of English Poetry......Page 16 1: ‘Barbarous Hymn’: The Extinction of Early Saxon Poetry in the Romantic Imagination......Page 49 2: The Constant Roots of English Song: Anglo-Saxon and Essential Englishness......Page 93 Inter-chapter: Slaying the Jabberwock: Lewis Carroll’s Parody of Anglo-Saxonism......Page 145 3: Fossil Poems and the New Philology......Page 151 4: ‘A vastly superior thing’: The Fossil Poetry of Gerard Hopkins......Page 207 5: ‘From scarped cliff and quarried: stone a thousand types gone’ Tennyson’s Anglo-Saxon......Page 250 Conclusion and Coda: Fossil Poetry into the Twentieth Century......Page 285 MANUSCRIPT SOURCES......Page 292 PRIMARY SOURCES: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL, ANTIQUARIAN EDITIONS......Page 293 PRIMARY SOURCES: POST MEDIEVAL......Page 295 Index......Page 320 5: 'From scarped cliff and quarried: stone a thousand types gone' Tennyson's Anglo-SaxonConclusion and Coda: Fossil Poetry into the Twentieth Century; Bibliography; MANUSCRIPT SOURCES; PRIMARY SOURCES: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL, MODERN EDITIONS; PRIMARY SOURCES: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL, ANTIQUARIAN EDITIONS; PRIMARY SOURCES: POST MEDIEVAL; Index