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Andrew Bennett's Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity

Andrew Bennett's Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity readership, whereas all actual readers are particular, and because posterity signifies a future readership whereas all possible readings take place in the present. We can identify ourselves as posterity only by denying the word its posteriority, and if we deny that, then a contemporary reader has as good a claim to represent posterity as we do. It is a point that Byron made succinctly: ‘Why, I’m Posterity – and so are you; / And whom do we remember?’. But, then, as Bennett points out, Byron was the satirist of the Romantic cult of posterity. In his first two chapters Bennett persuasively argues that the Romantic cult of posterity should be distinguished both from the Renaissance preoccupation with the immortality of art, and from the neoclassical notion that the test of the greatness of a work of art is that its value should be permanent (Ben Jonson is, Bennett finds, the only writer to prefigure the Romantics, his resentment at the failure of his plays in the theatre matching their resentment at the failure of their poems to sell). He makes, too, a forceful case for the pervasiveness of the cult, drawing his illustrations not only from Hazlitt, Wordsworth http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Romanticism Edinburgh University Press

Andrew Bennett's Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity

Cronin, Richard
Romanticism , Volume 7 (2): 209 – Jul 1, 2001
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
1354-991X
eISSN
1750-0192
DOI
10.3366/rom.2001.7.2.209
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

readership, whereas all actual readers are particular, and because posterity signifies a future readership whereas all possible readings take place in the present. We can identify ourselves as posterity only by denying the word its posteriority, and if we deny that, then a contemporary reader has as good a claim to represent posterity as we do. It is a point that Byron made succinctly: ‘Why, I’m Posterity – and so are you; / And whom do we remember?’. But, then, as Bennett points out, Byron was the satirist of the Romantic cult of posterity. In his first two chapters Bennett persuasively argues that the Romantic cult of posterity should be distinguished both from the Renaissance preoccupation with the immortality of art, and from the neoclassical notion that the test of the greatness of a work of art is that its value should be permanent (Ben Jonson is, Bennett finds, the only writer to prefigure the Romantics, his resentment at the failure of his plays in the theatre matching their resentment at the failure of their poems to sell). He makes, too, a forceful case for the pervasiveness of the cult, drawing his illustrations not only from Hazlitt, Wordsworth

Journal

Romanticism – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Jul 1, 2001

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