Name: Meredith Walker

Title: “Poetic Artifice in the 19th Century”

Abstract: "Poetic artifice," a concept developed by Veronica Forrest-Thompson in the 1970s, describes the excess of a poem's non-semantic elements in relation to its strictly semantic ones. In this paper, I consider the changing relation of poetics to "artifice" across the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century poetics shifted emphasis from an naturalizing, organicist rhetoric toward a more architectural, self-conscious poetic constructedness. Broadly speaking, Romantic poetics concealed artifice while Victorian poetics emphasized it. The above schema can serve to situate close readings of individual nineteenth-century poems within a broader cultural history.