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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
Laura Quinney. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Pp. 208. $30.00.
The University of Virginia Press's jacket advertises The Poetics of Disappointment as "nothing less than a complete revision of our understanding of romantic poetry." It would be more reasonable to place it, as Harold Bloom does in another laudatory blurb, among the "[d]ozens of books that ... describe the continuities of the Romantic self from Wordsworth and Shelley to Stevens and Ashbery." The Poetics of Disappointment belongs to a close-reading, psychologically-oriented approach in which Bloom himself has been a preeminent practitioner. No imputation should be understood from the observation that the four poets and the type of poem upon which Quinney focuses, the "crisis lyric," derive from Bloom's work of the 70s.
Quinney's thematic focus on "disappointment," a term that she uses in a specialized sense that I will come back to momentarily, highlights a particular strain of common qualities among her four poets. They share nostalgia for youth, imbedded narratives of thwarted, idealistic hopes, self-doubt, existential skepticism, and depression. This book succeeds best in demonstrating the continuing centrality and richness of these themes in lyric poetry. By her sensitive quotation from poems, and often eloquent commentary upon the nuances and complexities of their pathos, Quinney reveals a clue as to why the romantic "dejection ode" has remained vital,...
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