Eric Eisner. Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-230-22815-3. Price: US$85.00

Upon the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, Byron famously remarked, “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” The famousness of Byron’s observation about his fame nicely captures the double nature of modern celebrity: the success of Child Harold made Byron famous, but, in turn and increasingly, he was famous for being famous. Eric Eisner’s excellent Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity explores the recursive nature of modern celebrity and carefully traces several of the many permutations of poetic fame in the Romantic and early Victorian periods. Eisner’s study frames its investigation of literary celebrity in the nineteenth century in terms of the doubling that makes famous poets into poets of fame—a pervasive phenomenon that shapes the poetic careers of the authors he examines in myriad ways. Celebrity is of course a central concern for Byron, the most famous of the period’s literary celebrities, but also, Eisner argues, for Keats and Shelley, whose lack of popular success nevertheless reflects contemporary celebrity culture, as well as Letitia Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetry interrogates both fame and its gendering. Literary celebrity, as Eisner describes it, is more than one topic among many. Instead, it becomes a matrix for understanding a range of literary historical issues—in particular, the fate of the poet in the literary marketplace of the early nineteenth century. Eisner grounds his account of literary celebrity in historical and affective terms, describing the “burgeoning culture of literary celebrity” in nineteenth-century Britain and characterizing it in terms of the “powerful feelings of fascination, desire, love or horror” with which readers responded to writers. He understands the power of this celebrity culture as a function of its effects on poetic practice in the period, which “was crucially shaped by the practices of its star-struck readers and by the affective relationships between reader and writer those practices served to mediate” (1). Eisner is attentive throughout to the affective dimension of readers’ responses—which forms the basis of his consideration of celebrity’s impact on poetic form—as well as its place in “the mechanisms and structures of the world of popular celebrity” (2). As an introductory example of the dynamics of reaction and response that characterize literary celebrity in the early nineteenth century, he offers an illuminating reading of De Quincey’s pursuit of his literary idol, Wordsworth. Eisner traces De Quincey’s management (in print) of perhaps the most public reader-writer relationship in the period, demonstrating that De Quincey’s fascinated response to Wordsworth is not merely set against the backdrop of “the increased distance between writer and reader in the early nineteenth century as compared with the mid-eighteenth, but … that De Quincey requires a sensation of that distance—indeed, in a way exacerbates it—in order to produce the peculiarly intense closeness of his relationship to Wordsworth” (9). This reading at once exemplifies Eisner’s skills as a critic and points to the way in which the larger argument of his study aligns celebrity culture with the transformation of the market for literature and the professionalization of authorship in the early nineteenth century: I quote from the introduction at length because its itinerary of topics is delivered to the reader as a promise of the issues the book will address, and, to an admirable extent, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity delivers. Eisner’s first three chapters, on Byron, Keats, and Shelley, take on familiar topics; they are also the best of the book. Chapter one situates Byron in “a thriving celebrity culture” (20-1) by way of discussions of Mary Robinson’s scandalous celebrity, the reception of Byron’s “Fare Thee Well!” and the “performative women” of Canto I …