Life: Organic Form and Romanticism

(Yale University Press)  This book looks at how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form.  The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed in a culture obsessed with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation, and they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.”  Gigante offers a way to read difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.  Gigante is an associate professor of English at Stanford University.