Jeffrey C. Robinson. Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism. New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ISBN: 1403965137. Price: US$75

Pity the poor Fancy. This faculty has long been the most misunderstood, underestimated gift of poets. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in the Biographia) codified the role of fancy as a mere handmaiden to the sublime powers of the creative Imagination, he consigned the faculty to a position of ornamental irrelevance from which it has barely managed to escape. Fancy, Coleridge tells us, is the mere “DRAPERY” of poetic genius, “IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere.” Superfluous at best and a positive obstruction at worst, the flimsy surface effects of the Fancy have on this account a subordinate relationship to the animating spirit of the imaginative whole. Since Coleridge’s time, the Fancy has scarcely fared much better in accounts of romantic poetry and aesthetics. For nearly two centuries this faculty and its poetic embodiments have remained hidden in plain sight. Such, at least, was the case until the appearance of Jeffrey Robinson’s Unfettering Poetry. Robinson’s book is an elegant and unabashedly exuberant defense of Fancy in English poetry, which seeks to restore this faculty to its rightful place at the center of British Romanticism, and at subsequent, mainly twentieth-century, delineations of an experimental literary aesthetics. As Robinson sensibly observes in his introduction, Romanticism is more than the lyric subject convening with its own thoughts in sublime and melancholy isolation. It is also unpredictable, aleatory, and playful; it delights in things, celebrating the mutual emergence and interdependence of self and world; its mood is not duty-bound and self-interrogating but cheerful, unregulated, unfettered and “unfettering.” This “experimental and irreverent side of Romanticism” (84) is the focus of Robinson’s book. Unfettering Poetry is a recuperatory project that, in addition to its corrective privileging of Fancy over Imagination, gives close attention to authors in whom the poetics of the Fancy are seen to be strongest, many of whom have only recently returned to the attention of critics. In the three central chapters comprising Part II of the book, Robinson reads the poetry of Mary Robinson and the Della Cruscans, Leigh Hunt and his circle, and Felicia Hemans as major exponents of the poetics of Fancy. Robinson’s extensive turn to Romanticism’s erroneously-labeled “minor” poets builds upon work of the last two decades that has undertaken similar acts of critical recovery. By the same token, Robinson reveals several of Romanticism’s major figures, particularly Wordsworth and Keats, to have been poets and occasional celebrants of the Fancy. This practice of juxtaposition – “canonical poetry discussed next to the noncanonical, poetry of men next to that of women” (195) – is both a signature of Robinson’s book and a practical application of its argument: the recuperation of Fancy requires us to look anew at poets we have long ignored as well as to look at more familiar poets in a new way. In an aside from his fine chapter on Robinson’s Della Cruscanism, Robinson observes that his aim has been “to color her poetry in the strangeness it deserves” (128); this statement might in a sense be taken as the programmatic aspiration of the book as a whole. That defamiliarization is itself a signature trope of so-called “high” Romanticism is no impediment to Robinson’s argument, which identifies a “counter-poetics” of Fancy that operates at once within and against the grain of the Romantic imagination (11). The heirs of Robinson’s Romanticism are not Arnold, Eliot, and Stevens, but the experimental poets of modernism and beyond – Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Charles Bernstein, and others. Robinson describes his project as an effort to challenge and dispel the “master narrative of the phenomenon we call Romanticism” (114). In chapters 1 …