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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fiddled out of Reason: Addison and the Rise of Hymnic Verse, 1687-1712

Fiddled out of Reason: Addison and the Rise of Hymnic Verse, 1687-1712

Knapp, John William

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Music

ISBN10: 1611462886
ISBN13: 9781611462883
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Published: Apr 19 2021
Pages: 270
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Fiddled out of Reason is a study of several poems spanning the life and career of Joseph Addison, who, along with John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Ambrose Philips, Isaac Watts, and many British poets of the turn of the eighteenth century, helped to cultivate a broad new current of nonliturgical hymnic verse that became immensely popular across that century, though it has eluded critical notice until now. The texts the book examines--Addison's St. Cecilia's Day odes (1692, 1699), his libretto for the opera Rosamond (1707), and a sequence of five hymnic works in The Spectator (1712)--precede by twenty-five years John Wesley's publication of the first hymnal for use in the Church of England. The book argues that secular hymnic works such as Addison's emerged alongside religio-political controversies and anxieties about British national identity, morality, and expressions of enthusiastic passions. Church and Tory interests largely rejected hymnic verse, claiming it would only fiddle unwitting readers out of their reason and reignite the dangerous fervor of Revolution-era Nonconformity and Dissent. As is evident from his poetry, Addison, a moderate Whig, ardently opposed this view, arguing that the hymnic could in fact be a portal to national and individual amelioration. After an introductory chapter exploring period conceptions of hymnic poetry and the highly contested term hymn itself, the argument proceeds through three sections to trace the hymnic's upward trajectory through Addison's early, mid-period, and mature verse. The book devotes the lion's share of its attention to the last of these three, which includes the five-poem Spectator sequence (a poem from the sequence, The Spacious Firmament on High, will be familiar to many readers). Indeed, in addition to offering new readings of hymnic works by Dryden and Pope, Fiddled out of Reason provides the first extended critical treatment of these five important poems. Publication of the book coincides with the 300th anniversary of Addison's death and with the appearance of a new Oxford edition of Addison's nonperiodical writings.

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