...monograph, Unfettering Jeffrey Robinson challenges the "fanciphobia" that, by his account, has distorted the reception of Romantic writing since Coleridge relegated the fancy to the lowly status it has enjoyed ever afterwards, as disadvantaged sister of the lordly imagination. Robinson admits that the fancy and the imagination are "labile" terms. Before Coleridge presented them as antitheses, they were apt to be almost synonymous, and for Leigh Hunt they remained so. Robinson presents the terms as antithetical still more emphatically than Coleridge. But for him the difference between them works consistently to reinforce the claims of the fancy. He insists at one point that his "purpose here is not to denigrate one type of poem in favour of another," but the book as whole scarcely supports this claim. It ends by roundly asserting that "the poetics of the Fancy interpreted broadly--rather than the poetry of the lyric subject [the poetry, that is, of the imagination]--dominated the progressive and most fruitful strain of poetic activity in the early nineteenth century."

Robinson construes the poetics of the fancy broadly. He accommodates a poem such as Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, because, although Barbauld uses a conventional verse form, heroic couplets, her subject matter is drawn from "the domain of the dispossessed and disenfranchised," and he accommodates T. S. Eliot because, despite his conservatism, his poetry advances "principles of experimental poetics." A single term that characterizes at once a poetry that is formally conservative but has a radical content, and a poetry that is formally experimental but has a conservative content will seem to some readers too broad by half. But this would be unfair. If Robinson admires T. S. Eliot, it is only because he believes, as Shelley did of Wordsworth, that his political principles find their own best antidote in his poetic practice. Robinson is unquestioningly committed to the view that aesthetic and political values are inseparable, and his own politics place him firmly on the side of the "progressives and...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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