Unfettering Poetry

"Unfettered Poetry" calls attention to the pervasive but largely unacknowledged poetics of the 'Fancy' evident in poetry written during the British Romantic period. These poetics, Robinson demonstrates, are an early nineteenth-century version of what will become the visionary, experimental, open-form poetics of the twentieth-century. Robinson elaborates its importance by defining it historically in the philosophy, aesthetics and poetic manifestoes of the era preceding and just following the French Revolution. As well, he demonstrates its presence in Romantic poetry and the Romantic essay by canonical and non-canonical figures and by familiar male writers and by the recently re-discovered women poets of the Romantic Period.