William Hymers and the Editing of William Collins's Poems, 1765–97

Modern Language Review, 2011

This article examines the eighteenth-century reception and editorialising of William Collins's poems, devoting particular attention to the editions that John Langhorne and Anna Barbauld published in 1765 and 1797, respectively. Discussing editorial practices and the ways in which Collins's poems were contextualised in aesthetic but also in literary-historiographical terms, the essay introduces an unpublished edition of the poet's productions by William Hymers. The exploration of this edition-in-the-making focuses on Hymers's attempt at making sense of Collins's descriptive-allegorical mode, his mythopoeia, and the ways in which he could embed the poet's works within an emerging tradition of literary progress.

This study seeks to address William Collins (1721 – 1759) as a Pre-Romantic poet. It regards mid-eighteenth century poetry as prophetic; that is to say, mid-century poetry predicts and precedes Romanticism, and consequently to be called as Pre-Romanticism. In the Pre-Romantic period, rigid notions about style and the absolute authority of religion and science began to yield to an emphasis on personal thoughts and feelings, often triggered by the observation of nature. The search for meaning led to the probing of the mind and a focus on the inner self, and to an individual, personal interpretation of the world. The most important characteristics of Pre-Romanticism are: primitivism, individualism, simplicity, sentimentality, exaltation of imaginative power, and spontaneity, natural religion, the taste for the sublime, exaltation of Classics, and originality. The close analysis of Collins’s poems, Specifically Ode to Evening and Ode Written in Beginning of the Year 1746, discloses that he can be considered as a Pre-Romantic poet: Collins’s feelings are intense when he contemplates abstractions, and he is concerned with the role of imagination in poetry. He believes that imagination rather than reason, an Augustan concern, is the essential quality of the poet. Moreover, the vast majority of his poems manifest a close affinity with nature in correspondence with the intense feelings of the poet and with the passage of time. He depicts landscape, death, grandeur, patriotism, nature, emotion, and individualist thought which can be perceived in the Romantic poetry in its full growth.

2001

The Cambridge companion to eighteenth-century poetry / edited by John Sitter. p. cm.-(Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0 521 65090 9 (hardback) isbn 0 521 65885 3 (paperback) 1. English poetry-18th century-History and criticism. I. Sitter, John E. II. Series. pr551.c27 2001 821′.509-dc21 00-063059 isbn 0 521 65090 9 hardback isbn 0 521 65885 3 paperback CONTENTS List of illustrations page xi Notes on contributors xii Chronology xiv Introduction: the future of eighteenth-century poetry 1 john sitter Couplets and conversation 11 j. paul hunter Political passions 37 christine gerrard Publishing and reading poetry 63 barbara m. benedict The city in eighteenth-century poetry 83 brean hammond "Nature" poetry 109 tim fulford Questions in poetics: why and how poetry matters 133 john sitter Eighteenth-century women poets and readers 157 claudia thomas kairoff Creating a national poetry: the tradition of Spenser and Milton

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2005

Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600, 2008

My three contributions cover Piers Plowman (Passus 17), The Piers Plowman Tradition, and the “Maye Eclogue” in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender.

Speculum, 2004

The story of the poet laureate has not yet been fully told, and, until it is, fifteenthcentury English poetry will continue to appear a precursor to nothing. 1 Although recently much of this long-disparaged poetry has been ably recuperated, one largely retains the sense that, as complex and well crafted as it now sometimes appears to be, it has scarce, if any, relation to the tradition that succeeds it. With the notion of the poet laureate, however, one may trace a continuous line of influence from Chaucer to the present that not only includes the fifteenth century but also finds there-apart from Chaucer's brief prompting-its English point of origin. The ideals and problems attending this notion do not die out when the fifteenth-century Chaucerians are eclipsed by the courtly makers of the next century but rather persist more or less visibly in the latter's work and in that of succeeding generations of English poets. The notion of the laureate, of course, is not static but takes a distinct form and is associated with a specific set of practices for each poet who takes it up. In addition, it possesses a long history prior to its first explicit appearance in English verse, in the prologue to Chaucer's Clerk's Tale (1390s?). To tell its story-even just that part that includes the fifteenth century-would therefore be a formidable task, one beyond my ambitions in this essay. My aim instead is to demonstrate the critical utility of this story for the reassessment of the value and interest of George Ashby, one of the most neglected poets of the tradition. Under the lens of this story, the work of this mid-fifteenth-century poet-which for the most part has been dismissed in the manner Plato dismissed all poetry, as an imitation of an imitation-appears at once historically important, formally sophisticated, and thematically profound. Other lenses could be-and in a few instances have been-Among the many individuals whose help proved essential to the completion of this article, space permits me to thank by name only the first one-Lee Patterson-and the last several: my readers in the 2002 writing group at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame (Deborah McGrady, Lezlie Knox, Valerie Garver, and Jimmy Mixson) and the anonymous Speculum reader. I owe thanks as well to the libraries of Cambridge University and Trinity College, Cambridge, for granting me access to Ashby's manuscripts and to the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale Center for British Art for the Traveling Fellowship that made the visit to Cambridge possible. Presentations of some of this material at Yale and Rhodes College garnered important early feedback, and a leave of absence from Rhodes College facilitated the article's composition. Also, here at the outset, I should acknowledge a general debt to the ground laid by

2021

This study examines the transmission and compilation of poetic texts through manuscripts from the late-Elizabethan era through the midseventeenth century, paying attention to the distinctive material, social, and literary features of these documents. The study has two main focuses: the first, the particular social environments in which texts were compiled and, second, the presence within this system of a large body of (usually anonymous) rare or unique poems. Manuscripts from aristocratic, academic, and urban professional environments are examined in separate chapters that highlight particular collections. Two chapters consider the social networking within the university and London that facilitated the transmission within these environments and between them. Although the topic is addressed throughout the study, the place of rare or unique poems in manuscript collections is at the center of the final three chapters. The book as a whole argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the social life of texts in the period and to little-known or unknown rare or unique poems that represent a field of writing broader than that defined in a literary history based mainly on the products of print culture.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2021

Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2022

This volume comprises the first half of Volume vi of the Collected Works of Hopkins. (The second half will feature Hopkins's many drawings as well as his extensive notes on music). Many of the pieces in the present volume of over five hundred pages deal with Hopkins's study of Latin and Greek, beginning with his years at the Highgate School, beginning in 1856 when he was twelve, through his years at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1863 to June 1867, when he graduated with First Class Honours, no mean feat in itself. The collection, as its editor, R. K. R. Thornton, points out, "gathers up material that did not fit into earlier categories." That is, material lying outside Hopkins's correspondence, diaries, journals, notebooks, Oxford essays and notes, sermons and spiritual writings, the Dublin Notebook of 1884-86, and (the last volume in the collection which will be published), his collected poems. As Thornton explains, different as the material here is, it too constitutes another rich if admittedly "unruly" collection, bringing together Hopkins's school notes, followed by his teaching notes during his year lecturing Jesuit scholastics at Roehampton (1873-74), and his assembled comments during his

Yeats Annual, 1988

An annotated copy of one ofYeats's collections, which has come to light at Washington State University's Holland Library, allows corrections in the standard editions ofYeats's poems and plays as well as the standard bibliography upon which these depend. 1 Responsibilities and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, March 1917) proves to be more than a mere "second impression" of the English edition of Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916; Wade 115). Since both the Variorum Poems and Variorum Plays have followed Wade, a number of the variants reported for the poems of Responsibilities and The Green Helmet, the play The Hour-Glass, and the notes for this collection, are errors of oversight. Now that all the materials for detecting these errors are at hand-including the annotated volumes listed in Edward O'Shea's A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats's Library (1985)-we can have a much clearer view of the transmission of Yeats's texts. The 1917 "impression" of Responsibilities at WS U has a story to tell, however, beyond the correction of errors. As an author-annotated text, it shows that Yeats made further revisions in this volume, ostensibly for yet another reprint. 2 Although a third impression was not made, almost all of his intentions were carried out in the 1922 editions of Later Poems and Plays in Prose and Verseboth published by Macmillan-and, in the case of the holograph poem pasted over the song "The Well and the Tree", into the Cuala Press edition of Seven Poems and a Fragment. Virtually complete in 1912, "The New Faces" had a frustrating and extraordinary history, 108 W. Gould (ed.), Yeats Annual © Warwick Gould 1988 The Annotated Responsibilities 109 including a role in the first draft of a major poem, "A Prayer for my Daughter". But since the chronology is important, the story of the holograph and the annotations will follow a list of changes that had already appeared in the 191 7 text. Yeats would have had good reason to use the London reprint of 1917 for his revisions because it was the most advanced text of those poems. All of the changes marked in one of his 1916 London editions of Responsibilities, YL 2412, were realised in the 191 7 reprint. Because he has relied too much on the authority of Wade and the VP, O'Shea is mistaken in interpreting the annotations in 2412 as "apparently made to provide a partial copytext for WADE 134, LATER POEMS, London, 1922". In fact, the annotations he transcribes constitute an almost complete list of all textual variants between Responsibilities 1916 and Responsibilities 191 7. The "second impression" of 1917 differs considerably more from the original than does the 1916 American edition of Responsibilities and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan, I Nov. 1916; Wade 116), which agrees with the first London edition except occasionally in punctuation and spelling. As illustrated below, then, a significant stage of the revision of these poems had been completed much earlier than previously thought. The dates 10 October 1916 and March 1917 define the stage broadly. But, in fact, all textual changes, save in the notes, were made in a copy text submitted to Macmillan on