Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

What does it mean to write or visualize a feeling rhythmically? Where does feeling sit within rhythm, and rhythm within feeling? This book looks into the heart of rhythm and the poetic imagination through the works of three of the most celebrated poets of all time. Through close studies of poetic and visual process, Rhythms of Feeling interprets the manuscripts, letters, diaries, drawings, and poetry of Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Tracing exciting lines of interplay, affinity, and influence between these writers for the first time, the book shifts the terms of critical debate on Lear, Eliot, and Smith and subtly reorients the traditional account of the genealogies of modernism. Going beyond a biographically framed close reading or a more general analysis framed by affect theory, Rhythms of Feeling traces out these poets’ ‘affective rhythms’ (tears, nerves, rage) to consider the way that poetics, the mental and physical process of writing and reading, and the ebbs and flows of their emotional weather, might be in dialogue. Attentive, acute, and often forensic, the book broadens its reach beyond these three poets to contemporary writers and medical accounts of creativity and cognition. Alongside deep critical study, Rhythms of Feeling seeks to bring emotional intelligence to criticism, finding ways of speaking lucidly and humanely about emotional and physical states that defy lucidity and stretch our sense of the human.