1. Skylark-Image: or, the Vitality of Disappearance.
- Author
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Pyle, Forest
- Subjects
- *
VITALITY , *LITERARY criticism , *19TH century English poetry - Abstract
This essay explores how Shelley's distinctive deployments of “vitality” – as an immaterial force that is essential to life – punctuate the poetry and the essays, from the “mockery of vital hues” on Alastor's “cheek of death” to the “bright shape of vital stone that drew the life out of Pygmalion” in The Witch of Atlas. The most illuminating account of Shelley's investment in vitality appears in A Defence of Poetry, where the language of poets is said to be “vitally metaphorical,”marking the before “unapprehended relations of things.” In this paper, I examine how this “vitality of disappearance” is in play in “To a Skylark,” where what Gilles Deleuze might have called the bird's literal and figurative “lines of overflight” mark the “vital” conjunction between a sensory disappearance and aesthetic vitality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
- Published
- 2014
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