VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTUREVICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE"The theory of badness in poetry has never received the study which it deserves, partly on account of its difficulty." So wrote I. A. Richards in 1924. We still don't have a good account of poetic badness; it remains easier to say something serious about why one poem is valuable than to say something serious about why another is not. This talk explores the problem of poetic badness, Richards's efforts to theorize it, and his remarkably ambivalent use of the popular nineteenth-century poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox as an exemplary case.
Naomi Levine is an assistant professor of English at Yale University. Her first book, The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History, was just published by the University of Chicago Press.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 133 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241107T230000Z DTEND:20241107T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR