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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Among My Books: Second Series," James Russell Lowell presents a captivating exploration of literature and culture through the lens of critical analysis and personal reflection. This collection of essays showcases Lowell's elegant prose style, seamlessly blending wit and erudition while engaging with a range of poets and authors, including John Milton, Robert Browning, and Shakespeare. Situated within the broader context of 19th-century American literary criticism, Lowell's work champions the importance of literature for moral and intellectual growth, revealing his profound understanding of the interplay between art and society. James Russell Lowell (1819'Äì1891), a key figure in the American Romantic Movement, was not only a poet but also an influential critic, editor, and diplomat. His scholarly pursuits were informed by a rich educational background and his commitment to social reform, which often permeated his writing. Lowell's literary career was characterized by a desire to elevate American literature, and this work exemplifies his belief in the power of literature to challenge and inspire readers, reflecting his own experiences and ideals. Recommended for scholars and enthusiasts of American literature, "Among My Books: Second Series" invites readers to engage deeply with literary texts while reflecting on their timeless relevance. This collection serves not only as a critical companion but also as a meditation on the enduring impact of literature in shaping human thought and culture. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Among My Books. Second Series
Table of Contents
Introduction
Among My Books. Second Series gathers James Russell Lowell’s mature reflections on five major poets—Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats. Conceived as a companion to his earlier volume of literary studies, it continues his project of interpreting the masters for the general reader while meeting the expectations of serious scholarship. The book’s purpose is not to compile texts by these authors, but to illuminate them: to clarify historical situations, probe the shaping forces of their art, and weigh their legacies. Lowell writes to cultivate judgment and pleasure in reading, offering orientation to newcomers and fresh perspectives to experienced admirers.
Each essay functions as a sustained critical portrait, blending biography, intellectual history, and close attention to style and structure. Rather than assembling exhaustive catalogues, these are carefully argued appreciations that locate a poet within a lineage and a climate of ideas. The selection spans languages, periods, and temperaments—from medieval Italy to the English Renaissance and the British Romantic movement—showing continuities and ruptures across the tradition that English readers inherit. By choosing figures whose work anchors entire eras, Lowell sketches a map of the poetic imagination’s development, tracing influence, contrast, and conversation among writers whose vocabularies and aims differ yet continually answer one another.
This collection consists of essays in literary criticism and appreciation. The pieces are discursive studies rather than fiction or verse, incorporating biographical sketches, historical framing, and textual analysis. Lowell attends to diction, meter, imagery, and rhetorical structure, and he refers to original languages and prior criticism to clarify points. Notes and asides deepen the argument by drawing on classical and modern sources. Readers should expect argumentative prose that synthesizes reading and research, not an anthology of poems or a documentary record. The variety lies in emphasis—sometimes linguistic, sometimes historical, sometimes aesthetic—across the five subjects, yet the form remains the critical essay.
Lowell’s critical manner is learned yet companionable. He pairs a wide command of letters with an eye for the telling detail, moving easily from philological points to broad aesthetic judgments. His prose is richly allusive and often witty, but it is governed by a moral seriousness that treats poetry as an expression of character and conscience. He favors comparison as a method, testing claims by setting one poet against another or by weighing a text against its age. The result is a criticism that is at once historical and personal: firmly grounded in evidence, yet candid about preferences and standards.
Considered together, these essays survey pivotal ideas about what poetry can do. Dante embodies the reach of vision and architecture of meaning; Spenser exemplifies allegory, courtesy, and the pleasure of design; Wordsworth explores inwardness, memory, and the claims of nature; Milton concentrates power in moral argument and epic form; Keats refines sensuous apprehension and the shaping of beauty. Lowell attends to how faith, philosophy, politics, and language shape each achievement, and to how each poet’s temper inflects style. In tracing these traits, he suggests a continuous conversation about imagination, duty, and delight that binds disparate centuries into a tradition.
The collection endures because it models criticism that is both readable and responsible. Lowell brings large questions—about judgment, influence, and taste—down to the level of lines and images, letting form and diction carry meaning. He neither reduces poetry to biography nor seals it off from life; instead, he shows how a poet’s circumstances and reading become art. As an American critic engaging European and British masters, he also helps frame a transatlantic canon that later readers recognize. Even where one may debate his verdicts, the clarity of his reasoning and the breadth of his knowledge make the debate itself rewarding.
This second series complements, but does not require, acquaintance with Lowell’s earlier volume. Each essay stands alone, inviting readers to approach in any order or to dwell with one poet before moving to the next. Taken as a whole, the book offers a coherent itinerary through major monuments of verse, equipping readers with historical bearings and critical tools they can carry elsewhere. It is designed for sustained reading as well as for consultation, and it speaks both to students seeking reliable introductions and to seasoned readers looking to test their sense of the canon. The invitation is to read better, not merely more.
Historical Context
From late medieval Florence to Regency London, the authors treated in Among My Books. Second Series traverse Europe’s seismic transformations. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote amid Guelph–Ghibelline strife; Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) in Elizabeth I’s expanding state; John Milton (1608–1674) through civil war and republic; William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and John Keats (1795–1821) under the aftershocks of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars. Their careers register successive regimes of knowledge—scholasticism, humanism, Reformation theology, Enlightenment inquiry, and Romantic subjectivity—and shifting cultural geographies centered on Florence, London, Cambridge, the Lake District, and Rome. Across these centuries, the poet’s role evolves from civic moralist to visionary seer, yet retains a drive to fuse personal utterance with public meaning.
Language and nation-making supply a continuous backdrop. Dante’s elevation of Tuscan helped consolidate a literary Italian later policed by the Accademia della Crusca (founded 1583, Florence). In England, Caxton’s press (1476) and the Stationers’ Company (chartered 1557) underwrote a national book trade in which Spenser and Milton shaped idiom and meter; Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) further standardized usage that Wordsworth contested in 1798–1800 with a “real language of men.” Keats, schooled in London yet steeped in Hellenic revival, explored a lusher register. Venetian Aldines and London houses from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries carried these voices into an international marketplace increasingly mediated by reviews and anthologies.
Religious and political upheaval repeatedly recalibrated poetic authority. Dante’s quarrel with papal temporal power (Boniface VIII) unfolded alongside the imperial claims of the Holy Roman Empire. England’s Act of Supremacy (1534) and the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) framed Protestant nationhood for Spenser’s generation. The English Civil War (1642–1651), the regicide (1649), and the Restoration (1660) formed the crucible for Milton’s republican and theological commitments. Later, the French Revolution of 1789, Britain’s wars with France (1793–1815), and the Peterloo Massacre (1819, Manchester) forced Romantic writers to renegotiate liberty, order, and conscience. Across centuries, poetry served as both witness and instrument of contested sovereignty.
Humanist education and itinerant networks connected these writers across time. Grammar schools such as Merchant Taylors’ (1561) and St Paul’s (1509) fed the universities where Spenser (Pembroke, Cambridge), Milton (Christ’s, Cambridge), and Wordsworth (St John’s, Cambridge) absorbed classical curricula grounded in Virgil, Homer, and Aristotle. The Grand Tour and scholarly travel—Dante’s exile routes to Verona and Ravenna; Milton’s Italian journey (1638–1639); Wordsworth’s Alpine crossing (1790); Keats’s final sojourn to Rome (1820)—forged transnational exchanges with patrons, scientists, and artists. Coffeehouses and salons from seventeenth-century London to early nineteenth-century Hampstead and the Lakes sustained coteries whose debates about diction, genre, and politics reverberated through successive generations.
Patronage systems and print economies jointly shaped careers and canons. Medieval and Renaissance writers balanced civic ties with noble support (e.g., Can Grande della Scala at Verona), while Elizabethan court culture and colonial administration offered advancement for poets allied with powerful houses. The Commonwealth redirected subventions toward propaganda; the lapse of pre-publication licensing (1695) and the Statute of Anne (1710) shifted power toward booksellers and authors. By 1800, London-Edinburgh publishers and journals—the Edinburgh Review (1802), Quarterly Review (1809), Blackwood’s (1817), and the Examiner (1808)—could crown or crush reputations. Figures like John Murray and firms such as Taylor & Hessey illustrate how risk, coterie alliances, and criticism determined a poem’s fortune.
Aesthetic programs moved from scholastic synthesis to Romantic inwardness while retaining classical bearings. The epic line from Virgil runs through Christian universal visions and national allegory, then into reflective and lyric forms. Terza rima, allegory, and visionary topography frame medieval cosmology; the Spenserian stanza models ornate narrative; Miltonic blank verse becomes a standard for meditative and narrative amplitude; the sonnet and ode revive as high-pressure vessels for thought. Critical landmarks—Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595), Addison’s essays on the “imagination” (1712), Burke on the sublime (1757), and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)—mark turns toward the ordinary, the sublime, and the expressive self, all legible across these poets’ practices.
Scientific discovery, antiquarian zeal, and changing landscapes reframed poetic knowledge. Dante engages a geocentric cosmos informed by scholastic astronomy; Milton writes after the telescope (Galileo, 1610), with the Royal Society founded in 1660 and Newton’s Principia (1687) altering metaphors of order and motion. The British Museum (1753) and the Elgin Marbles (purchased 1816) fed neoclassical and Hellenic revivals salient to Romantic aesthetics. The picturesque (Gilpin, 1780s), enclosure, canal building, and rapid urbanization—London surpassing one million inhabitants by the 1801 census—recast relations between city and countryside, fueling the Lake District’s symbolic centrality and giving urgency to meditations on ruins, nature, sensation, and historical continuities.
Reception and canon formation turned local achievements into a shared heritage. Early commentary traditions culminated in Henry Francis Cary’s English Dante (1814), which shaped Romantic readings. Paradise Lost (1667) gained classic status through Addison’s Spectator papers (1712) and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–1781). Spenser’s revival coursed through eighteenth-century imitations (Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, 1748) and nineteenth-century medievalism; the sonnet renaissance drew authority from Chapman’s Homer (1598–1608) and subsequent translations. Reviewing cultures alternately derided and consecrated new work, as with Blackwood’s “Cockney School.” Memorial geographies—from Westminster Abbey (Spenser) to Ravenna (Dante) and Rome’s Protestant Cemetery (Keats)—inscribed a transnational map of poetic remembrance.
Synopsis (Selection)
Dante
Lowell situates Dante within medieval Florence and argues that the Divine Comedy fuses personal experience, scholastic theology, and civic feeling into an epic of moral order; he examines Dante’s language, allegory, and architectonic design to justify Dante’s preeminence in world literature.
Spenser
An appraisal of Edmund Spenser’s life and art, emphasizing The Faerie Queene as a vast moral-allegorical enterprise shaped by Elizabethan ideals; Lowell assesses Spenser’s sweetness of diction, the Spenserian stanza, pastoral beginnings, and the strengths and diffuseness of his narrative.
Wordsworth
Lowell traces Wordsworth’s poetic creed—plain speech, nature as spiritual teacher, and emotion recollected in tranquility—across Lyrical Ballads and later work, weighing his originality against periods of prosaic decline and positioning his influence as foundational to modern English lyric poetry.
Milton
A study of Milton’s character, learning, and Puritan convictions as the matrix of his art, with close attention to the epic structure and blank verse of Paradise Lost and to companion works like Comus, Lycidas, and Samson Agonistes; Lowell measures Milton’s classical models against his austere moral grandeur.
Keats
Lowell narrates Keats’s swift maturation from luxuriant sensuousness to sculpted classicism, reading Endymion, the Odes, and the Hyperion fragments as stages in a rapidly ripening art; he considers 'negative capability,' early hostile criticism, and the poet’s posthumous standing.
