Miracles of Rare Device: The Poet's Sense of Self in Nineteenth-Century Poetry

by Fred Kaplan

"Miracles of Rare Device" deals with the problems of creative anxiety as a major theme in Romantic and Victorian poetry. A study of the structure and imagery of major poems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it combines textual and suggestive evidence to support the premise that a major key to nineteenth century English poetry is an understanding of the poet’s concern with himself as artist and with his art. The study affirms the self-conscious "poem of the act of the mind" as an important phase in our poetic tradition. Chosen for close discussion Blake, "The Tyger"; Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"; Tennyson, "Locksley Hall" and "Merlin and Vivien"; Arnold, "Empedocles on Etna"; and Browning, "Andrea del Sarto," "Pictor Ignotus," "Dis Aliter Visum," and "Saul." Each offers evidence that between 1790 and 1864, among major poets, there was a gradually intensifying loss of faith in the power of poetry and creativity. In eleven graceful chapters, "Miracles of Rare Device" takes up a theme of major importance in our poetic tradition. The only full-length study to consider this theme in both Romantic and Victorian poetry, it demonstrates the dramatic continuity of the poet’s concern for his image of himself as poet, and reveals how the structure and imagery of both Romantics and Victorians embody their deepest anxieties about their capabilities as artists. It has implications also for the continuance of the tradition in poetry of the twentieth century.

196 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Fred Kaplan (born 1937) is distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He attended Lafayette High School and Brooklyn College. His book "Thomas Carlyle" was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

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