1st Edition

The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse

By Caroline Franklin Copyright 2010
    616 Pages
    by Routledge

    616 Pages
    by Routledge

    Gothic verse liberated the dark side of Romantic and Victorian verse: its medievalism, melancholy and morbidity.  Some poets intended merely to shock or entertain, but Gothic also liberated the creative imagination and inspired them to enter disturbing areas of the psyche and to portray extreme states of human consciousness.  This anthology illustrates that journey. 

    This is the first modern anthology of Gothic verse. It traces the rise of Gothic in the late eighteenth century and follows its footsteps through the nineteenth century. Gothic has never truly died as it constantly reinvents itself, and this lively, illustrated and annotated anthology offers students the atmospheric poetry that originally studded terror novels and inspired horror films. Alongside canonical verse by Coleridge, Keats and Poe, it introduces readers to lesser-known authors’ excursions into the macabre and the grotesque. A wide range of poetic forms is included: as well as ballads, tales, lyrics, meditative odes and dramatic monologues, a medievalist romance by Scott and Gothic drama by Byron are also included in full.

    A substantial introduction by Caroline Franklin puts the rise of Gothic poetry into its historical context, relating it both to Romanticism and Enlightenment historicism. Although Gothic fiction has now been receiving serious critical attention for twenty years, Gothic verse has been largely overlooked. It is therefore hoped that this anthology will stimulate scholarly interest as well as readers’ pleasure in these unearthly poems.

    Preface  Acknowledgements  Timeline  Introduction  Traditional Ballads Thomas Percy: Edward; Sweet William’s Ghost  Walter Scott: The Cruel Sister  Edward Young: From Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality in Nine Nights  Robert Blair: From The Grave, a Poem  Thomas Gray: The Fatal Sisters. An Ode  Wolfgang von Goethe: The Erl-King; The Bride of Corinth  Charlotte Turner Smith: Sonnet 44  George Crabbe: ‘Peter Grimes’ from The Borough; The World of Dreams  Mary Robinson: The Haunted Beach  Robert Burns: Tam o’Shanter: A Tale  Joanna Baillie: The Ghost of Faden  Helen Maria Williams: Part of an Irregular Fragment  Ann Radcliffe: From The Mysteries of Udolpho: Shipwreck  William Taylor: Ellenore  James Hogg: The Witch of Fife; Kilmeny; Superstition; A Witch’s Chant  William Wordsworth: The Thorn; The Danish Boy; From The Prelude, Book 1 lines 357-475  Sir Walter Scott: The Lay of the Last Minstrel  Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Christabel  Robert Southey: The Old Woman of Berkeley; God’s Judgement on a Wicked Bishop; Cornelius Agrippa’s Bloody Book; From Thalaba the Destroyer Book 8  M.G. Lewis: From The Monk; Midnight Hymn; Alonzo The Brave and Fair Imogine  John Herman Merivale: The Dead Men of Pest  Thomas Moore: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp  Charlotte Dacre: Death and the Lady; The Mistress to the Spirit of her Lover; Mildew  Leigh Hunt: Politics and Poetics  Thomas Love Peacock: From Maid Marian: A Damsel Came in Midnight Rain; It was a Friar of Orders Free  From Crotchet Castle: The Pool of the Diving Friar  George Gordon, Lord Byron: Manfred, A dramatic poem; The Black Friar, from Don Juan, Canto XVI  Percy Bysshe Shelley: From St Irvine, or, the Rosicrucian: Fragment, or the Triumph of Conscience; The Drowned Lover; Zeinab and Kathema; Ginevra  John Clare: The Haunted Pond; An Invite to Eternity  Felicia Hemans: Second Sight; The Haunted House  John Keats: Lamia; Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil. A Story from Boccaccio; The Eve of St Agnes; La Belle Dame Sans Merci  Nathaniel Thomas Haynes Bayly: The Mistletoe Bough  Thomas Hood: The Last Man; Mary’s Ghost  Thomas Lovell Beddoes: From Death’s Jest-Book, or the Fool’s Tragedy: Dirge; Song; A voice from the water  Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven; The Haunted Palace; The Sleeper  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Lady of Shalott  Robert Browning: Porphyria’s lover  Emily Brontë: I’m Happiest When Most Away; The Night is Darkening Round Me; In the Earth, the Earth, Thou Shalt be Laid  Emily Dickinson: I Like a Look of Agony; One Need not be a Chamber to be Haunted; Because I Could not Stop for Death; I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died  Christina Georgina Rossetti: Goblin Market  James Thomson: In the Room  Algernon Charles Swinburne: After death; Itylus  John Davidson: A Ballad of a Nun  (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling: The Vampire  Bibliography

    Biography

    Caroline Franklin