Poetry in the Novel

Taking up Virginia Woolf’s provocative claim that «the best prose is that which is most full of poetry», this study examines the different ways in which novelists have incorporated poetry into the fabric of their fictions. The inclusion of poems in a novel may serve a variety of purposes: to heighten the atmosphere, to represent a character’s sensations and thoughts as «stream of consciousness», to illustrate a protagonist’s creative output, to provide an explicit or embedded literary illusion, to function as an interlude or structural divider, or to create an unclassifiable literary hybrid that highlights an author’s dual talents. To illustrate these and other forms of integration, twenty-two works of prose fiction are analysed under five headings: textual composites that combine prose, poetry and poetic prose to achieve original effects; apprenticeship novels about the development of fictive poets and their work; fictions concerned with the investigation and appropriation of a dead poet’s opus; works in which a single long poem constitutes a novel’s principal focus; and research-based biofictions relating particular events in the lives of real poets. Intended to stimulate reflection on the interrelations of prose and poetry, this book works against literary compartmentalization by revealing how poetry can enhance prose narrative and how the novel can bring poetry to the notice of a wider reading public.

Adrian Kempton was formerly a lecturer in French, English and Comparative Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork and the University of London Institute in Paris. He specializes in comparative eighteenth-century studies, with particular interests in epistolary writing, robinsonades, early children’s literature, salon art criticism and gardens. His publications include Survey of English Literature: From the Restoration to Pre-Romanticism, English for Science, The Mind’s Isle: Imaginary Islands in English Literature (Peter Lang, 2017) and The Epistolary Muse: Women of Letters in England and France, 1652–1802 (Peter Lang, 2017). He is also the author of the companion to this book, The Verse Novel in English: Origins, Growth and Expansion (Peter Lang, 2018).