Fossil Poetry: Anglo-Saxon and Linguistic Nativism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 Theory of the Earth.Fossil Poetry argues that two, roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott, Henry Longfellow, William Wordsworth, William Barnes, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Morris, Alfred Tennyson, and Gerard Hopkins.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Fossil or Root? Anglo-Saxon and the Origin and Descent of English Poetry 1: 'Barbarous Hymn': The Extinction of Early Saxon Poetry in the Romantic Imagination 2: The Constant Roots of English song: Anglo-Saxon and Essential Englishness Slaying the Jabberwock: Lewis Carroll's Parody of Anglo-Saxonism 3: Fossil Poems and the New Philology 4: 'A vastly superior thing': The Fossil Poetry of Gerard Hopkins 5: 'From scarped cliff and quarried stone a thousand types gone': Tennyson's Anglo-Saxon Conclusion and Coda: Fossil Poetry into the Twentieth Century Bibliography

About the Author :
Chris Jones teaches at the University of St Andrews. His previous book Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-century Poetry (OUP, 2006) was shortlisted for the ESSE best book prize of 2007.

Review :
The great value of Jones' book is that it demonstrates the complexity of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It will take some time for the discipline to come to terms with that complexity. Jones' careful scholarship and revelatory archival research will contribute much to that work to come. Even among the writers selected, the web of who read whose works is difficult to track. Jones navigates this fecundity admirably, constructing a coherent narrative whilst remaining sensitive to the nuances of how individual writers responded to their imagined literary heritage. In doing so, he works to recover the nineteenth-century legitimacy of ideas that now seem absurd, such as the conviction that Romances and rhyming were of Anglo-Saxon origin. [This book] provides a welcome exploration of the influence of Old English language and verse on Victorian poetry. [...] Throughout Fossil Poetry, Jones shows a sensitive and thorough approach to the influence of Anglo-Saxon studies on the Victorian imagination, considering it in the light of nineteenth-century context and relevance. Fossil Poetry is an enlightening account of disciplinary formation, reminding present-day researchers of the postmedieval historicity of our objects of study. Jones brings out beautifully "the inventedness of the past". [...] Nineteenth-century specialists will have to heed this book, because Jones knows things they do not know. Fossil Poetry displays exemplary close reading and a skilful command of rhetorical, metrical, and philological analysis. . . . In addition to rigorous and original scholarship, this book has pressing significance: as Jones writes, 'Investigating the Anglo-Saxon poetries produced by the nineteenth century ought to help us reflect on what kind of Old English poetry we are manufacturing in our own moment, as well as on what kind of Englishnesses' (p. 33). If 'the past is provisional, ongoing, and retold in the light of contemporary concerns' (p. 272) then we have cause to be grateful for any account of it that is as subtly perceptive, deeply learned, and consistently generous as this book.