Fossil Poetry

<em>Fossil Poetry </em>provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use and role of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions as well as the construction and 'invention' of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. <em>Fossil Poetry</em> takes its title from a famous passage on 'early' language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology palaeontology and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton's apprehension of 'deep time' in his 1788 <em>Theory of the Earth.</em> <p/><em>Fossil Poetry</em> argues that two roughly consecutive phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly a phase of 'constant roots' whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble and so to legitimize a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly a phase in which the strangeness of many of the 'extinct' philological forms of early English is acknowledged and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. The volume advances new readings of work by a variety of poets including Walter Scott Henry Longfellow William Wordsworth William Barnes Walt Whitman Ralph Waldo Emerson William Morris Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Hopkins.<br>