French Literature Reviews - 2026
What's the Import?
Poetry and Poetics
Kerry McSWEENEY, What's the Import? Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice, Montréal-Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 224 p.
ISBN 0773532021
SUMMARY
Two conspicuous features of the radical transformation of literary studies over the past three decades have been the dominance of theory-based interpretative discourse and cultural studies contextualizations. Both have greatly energized literary studies — but they have done so at a cost.
Kerry McSweeney critiques such readings of Romantic, Victorian, and 19th-century American poems. In What's the Import? he proposes and exemplifies an aesthetic or intrinsic critical model rooted in literary-historical contextualization that considers the determination of meanings to be only one of the qualities that full engagement with a poem requires. His wide-ranging study discusses poems by Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Carroll, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Hopkins, Hardy, and the Michael Field poets. What's the Import? contributes to the current debates in North America about the state and direction of English studies and the teaching of literature in general.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction 3
2 Performing “The Solitary Reaper” and “Tears, idle tears” 10
3 Victorian Poems on Paintings 28
4 Indefinitiveness of Meaning in Parabolic Poems 47
5 Aesthetic and Ethical Value in Bigg’s “An Irish Picture” 67
6 The Cruxes of Whitman's “The Sleepers” 73
7 Grief as a Lyric Subject in Dickinson 87
8 Hopkins’ Godless Poems 108
9 Influence and Resistance in Hardy’s Poetry 124
10 Afterword: Two Browning Poems 143
Notes 149
Works Cited 157
Index 171
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kerry McSweeney is Molson Professor of English at McGill University and the author of numerous works, including The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson.
The institutional landscape of literary studies over recent decades has been deeply shaped by the rise of overarching theoretical frameworks and historicist contextualizations. These methodological shifts have opened up new avenues for reading canonical poetry from the Romantic and Victorian periods, yet they have also prompted ongoing debates regarding the primary aims of close reading and aesthetic evaluation. Within North American academic circles, scholars frequently revisit the tension between extrinsic cultural analysis and intrinsic attention to poetic form, texture, and execution in nineteenth-century verse.
Kerry McSweeney addresses these methodological discussions by proposing an aesthetic and intrinsic critical model rooted in literary-historical contextualization. Through focused readings of works by authors such as Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Whitman, and Dickinson, the study examines poems by engaging with their formal qualities beyond the mere determination of meanings. Readers interested in contemporary debates on the state of literary studies and the teaching of poetry may find this volume relevant.