In their refusal to aestheticize Crimean warfare, as most of their fellow poets and newspapermen had done, Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, in the co-authored Sonnets on the War (1855) present a harrowing picture of the conflict from myriad viewpoints, all of which deny the patriotism and hawkishness implicit in glamorizing armed conflict.
Read MoreA Hateful Cawing from the Crows →
W. E. Aytoun's satirical verse drama, Firmilian (1854), an anti-radical, scattershot missive meant to re-align British poetic tastes by reversing the aesthetic gains made by Romanticism in the decades prior to its publication, has been called “one of the most successful pieces of literary criticism ever written,”but did Firmilian accomplish its purposes? In what ways can we consider it successful if not?
Read MoreShelley's Spasmodic Afterlife →
Percy Shelley's political legacy passed through an often-neglected school of writers to world leaders and revolutionaries globally in the decades following his death. When assessing his legacy, we should not overlook those early, ardent appreciators known as "the Spasmodic School." Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, J. Stanyan Bigg, and even James Thomson B.V. took Shelley's call to a revolution conducted through imaginative sympathy seriously, and together, helped to fan his "fading coal" to flam
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