London: Capital of the Nineteenth Century

• Published in: New literary history Vol. 41; no. 1; pp. 111 - 128
• Main Author: Horowitz, Evan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2010; Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subjects: American literature; Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-1867); British & Irish literature; Capitalism; Communities; Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965); English language; French literature; Gray, Thomas (1716-1771); Hippocrates (460?-377? BC); Language history; Literary criticism; Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882); Modern art; Modern literature; Modernist art; Poetry; Poets; Spleen; Words
• ISSN: 0028-6087; 1080-661X; 1080-661X
• DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0136

[...] I hope to show that Baudelaire's attention to English life sharpened his representation of the modern, and that his engagement with English poetry expanded the range of his own verse (his relation to Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and American poetry is caught up in this as well, often in ways that make the "American" hard to distinguish from the "British"). Whereas preindustrial societies are bound by the old Malthusian trap-with economic growth forever offset by a growing population-fully industrial societies face no such trade-off.\n The demands of elegy have pushed Swinburne away from the idea of a long, slow, patient regeneration and towards a perhaps facile, if satisfying, vision of death as eternal community.