TRANS‐VICTORIANS: Poetics, Translation, English

Abstract

This essay discusses recent movements in poetics that highlight the circulation and mediation of poems and poetic discourse across the Atlantic, the translation and adaptation of poetry from other languages, and the influence of comparative linguistics on concepts of English poetry. Nineteenth‐century poets in England and America invented genres, histories, and traditions that became cemented by 20th century reading practices. If 19th‐century poetry is a space of possibility and questioning, we might rethink the upheavals of Anglo‐American modernism as well as rethink our narrow critical focus on the Anglophone world.