Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

233 Pages·1988·20.677 MB·English

by  Richard Cronin (auth.)

COLOUR AND EXPERIENCE IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
Also by Richard Cronin
SHELLEY'S POETIC THOUGHTS
Colour and
Experience in
Nineteenth-Century
Poetry
Richard Cronin
Lecturer in English Literature
University of Glasgow
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
©Richard Cronin 1988
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-44337-8
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First published 1988
Published by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Cronin, Richard
Colour and experience in nineteenth-century
poetry.
1. English poetry-19tl:t century-
History and criticism 2. Colour in
literature
I. Title
821'.7'0936 PR585.C6
ISBN 978-1-349-09558-2 ISBN 978-1-349-09556-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09556-8
To my mother and father
That stone is red; this stone is blue.'
'But how d'ye know it's blue?'
James Clerk Maxwell
in conversation with his nurse
'I wish you or Benson could eradicate the insane trick of reasoning about
colours as identified by their names. People seem to think that blue is
blue, and one blue as good as another.'
'I think a good deal may be learned from the names of colours, not about
colours, of course, but about names'
James Clerk Maxwell
in conversation with C. J. Monro
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Dull Red 7
Part One The Romantics
2 Awful Newton 19
3 A Rainbow in the Sky 29
4 Blue, Glossy Green, and Velvet Black 36
5 Woven Colours 46
6 Purple Riot 64
Part Two Robert Browning
7 Blind Hope 83
8 Rainbow Flakes 96
9 Seven Proper Colours Chorded 104
10 The Subtle Prism 116
11 The Red Thing 130
12 By White and Red Describing Human Flesh 144
13 The Crimson Quest 160
Part Three Gerard Manley Hopkins
14 Pure Blues 171
VII
viii Contents
15 Two Flocks, Two Folds - Black, White 180
16 Dappled Things 190
17 Gold-Vermilion 202
Conclusion 211
Notes 220
Index 226
Acknowledgements
I have debts to friends and to people I know only from their
writings. Of the second group my primary debt is to Bernard
Harrison, whose book Form and Content first set me thinking about
colour words. Stephen Prickett's The Poetry of Growth first
awakened me to the importance of the rainbow as a Romantic
symbol. My view of Keats was decisively influenced by the two
essays on Keats in John Bayley's The Uses of Division. Of the first
group it was Philip Drew who rekindled my interest in Browning,
and J. A. M. Rillie who talked about Hopkins so movingly that I
went away and read him carefully for the first time. As always I
have a debt to the friends who let me talk to them about my work,
and who made me grateful all over again for working in an English
department that has so many nice people in it. Ingrid Swanson, the
department secretary, taught me how to use a word-processor, an
achievement the magnitude of which those who do not know me
will be unable to form an impression. I am very grateful to her.
ix