On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.

Table of Contents:
1: Form's Matter: A Retrospective 2: Art for Art: On Pots, Crocks, Lyres, and Flutes 3: Touching Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism 4: Aesthetic Conditions: Pater's Re-Forming Style 5: Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee's Ghostly Aesthetics 6: Just a Word: On Woolf 7: Yeats's Feet 8: Wallace Stevens' Eccentric Souvenirs 9: W. S. Graham: In the Mind's Ear 10: Forms of Elegy: Stevenson, Muldoon, Hill, Fisher 11: Elegies of Form: Bishop, Plath, Stevenson 12: Nothing, but: An Afterword

About the Author :
Angela Leighton is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of a number of books, including Shelley and the Sublime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, as well as many essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature.

Review :
The drift of the book leaves me, as Leighton would wish, not persuaded of an argument but troubled by a question; the quality of her writing makes me realise how pleasurable a state of 'insecurity' can be. Matthew Reynolds, The Review of English Studies With a Paterian surrender to the beautiful and a Jamesian reverence for the critical proprieties of tact and attentiveness, On Form goes about its work of inspecting the unfixing of meaning without wanting to fix or finalise. Rebekah Scott, Essays in Criticism, Leighton's light-footed readings are a constant delight, while managing to find new true things to say even about beauty in Woolf or rhythm in Yeats. Stefan Collini, Times Literary Supplement a riveting book about a word that none of the arts can do without but none of the arts can quite describe. Adam Phillips, The Observer wonderfully sensitive to the literary works and ideas under discussion...One may read this work for its ideas, but also with great pleasure because Leighton handles language so elegantly. Or rather, this remarkable book instructs us through its own practice how the dynamic expression of ideas may itself be a form of literary pleasure. Michael D. Hurley ...deft and thoughtful as well as timely... Everything about On Form is judged and poised, with many things read beautifully and truly. TLS