Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling

The Romantic period witnessed decisive interest in how feeling might align with forms of artistic expression. Many critical studies have focused on the serious side and melancholic moods of Romantic poets. Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling instead embraces the sublime and the ridiculous to offer an original and compelling new reading of British Romanticism. It reveals the decisive role laughter and the laughable play in Romantic aesthetics, emotions, and ethics. Matthew Ward shows that laughter was one of the primary means by which Romantics embraced and expanded upon, but also frequently aped and lampooned, sympathetic feeling. The laughter of feeling is both the expression of sympathy and an articulation of its implications, prejudices, and constraints. For Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, the sound of laughter carries the hope that greater knowledge of others derives from feeling for and with them through poetry, and this might lead to a better understanding of oneself. Yet laughter also makes these poets acutely aware that our emotional lives are utterly unfamiliar and perhaps ultimately unknowable. Their prosody of laughter enlivens and exposes; it embodies their sense ofDLand ambitions forDLpoetry, and yet calls those matters into the most comical and gravest doubt. Laughter helps define what it is to be human. This book shows that it also defines what it is to be a 'Romantic' poet.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations A Note on the Texts Introduction PART ONE ON LAUGHTER 1: Laughter Means Sympathy? 2: An Incongruous Pair: A Romantic Sense of Humour and the Poetic Imagination PART TWO ON LAUGHING POETS AND POETICS 3: Wordsworth's Laughing Company 4: Shelley's Poetic Measures and Laughing Pleasures 5: Keats's Melodious Chuckle Coda: Byron's Last Laugh Selected Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Matthew Ward teaches at the University of Birmingham. He is the co-editor, with Clare Bucknell, of Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy (CUP, 2021), and has published on poetry and the history of ideas in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Essays in Criticism, Cambridge Quarterly, the Keats-Shelley Review, and The Byron Journal. Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling is his first monograph.

Review :
Ward explores the complexity and contradictions of laughter, demonstrating "the vital importance of laughter to Romantic emotions, affect, and poetic self-fashioning". In particular, he reveals the laughter of feeling as the means by which Romantics both articulated and questioned the concept of sympathy. Romantic Poets and the Laughter of Feeling is characterised throughout both by scholarly rigour and humane intelligence. It is a fine achievement and a refreshing contribution to the field. Lamb, for one, would surely approve.