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Literary Criticism English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Fresh Strange Music

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language

by (author) Donald S. Hair

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2015
Category
English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780773545939
    Publish Date
    Aug 2015
    List Price
    $115.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773597679
    Publish Date
    Sep 2015
    List Price
    $100.00

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Description

Elizabeth Barrett Browning evokes several figures as muses for her poetry, and one recurring type is the music master. While her writing has always been recognized as highly experimental, the influence and use of music in her work have not been fully examined. Fresh Strange Music defines the exact nature of Browning's experiments and innovations in rhythm, which she called the "animal life" of poetry, and in sound repetition, which she labelled her "rhymatology."

Donald Hair approaches Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art with a focus on the power that shapes it - the technical music of her poetry and the recurring beat at the beginning of units of equal time that requires a different system of scansion than conventional metres and syllable counting. Music for Barrett Browning, Hair explains, has momentous implications. In her early poetry, it is the promoter of kindly and loving relations in families and in society. Later in her career, she makes it the basis of nation-building, in her support for the unification of Italy and, more problematically, in her championing of French emperor Napoleon III.

Fresh Strange Music traces the development of Barrett Browning's poetics through all her works - from the early An Essay on Mind to Last Poems - showcasing her as a major poet, independently minded, and highly innovative in her rhythms and rhymes.

About the author

Donald A. Hair is a Professor in the Department of English, University of Western Ontario, and author of Tennyson'S Language, Domestic and Heroic in Tennyson's Poetry, and Browning's Experiments with Genre.

Donald S. Hair's profile page

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