Prosing Poetry: Blackwood’s and Generic Transposition, 1820–1840

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in its early decades - like many of the British monthly magazines from the period - risked the practice of generic impurity and revelled in anomaly, even as it published articles and arguments that worked to fight off the monster of undifferentiated discourse. From the early Blackwood’s attacks on the Cockney poets launched by John Gibson Lockhart, William Maginn, and John Wilson, to the parodies and stimulating narratives about lyric poets exchanged by the revellers of the Noctes Ambrosianae, one fairly consistent characteristic of Blackwood’s poetry criticism during the 1820s and 1830s was its inclination to experiment with formal fusions of the discursive categories of poetry and prose. The present chapter explores this characteristic of Blackwood’s criticism within the context of the broader trend in the early 1830s to attempt to distinguish poetry from other modes of discourse and to discuss it in terms of its intrinsic value. While the conception of poetry as a transcendent and universally felt experience ‘whatever the medium of expression’,1 transmitted as a perfectly realized and practically unmediated (immediate) aesthetic encounter of presence is not necessarily absent from the pages of Blackwood’s, it is hardly ever articulated there without either comedic exaggeration, or some other gesture that acknowledges the mediating factors and situational qualifications that must, inevitably, pertain to a definition of poetry as a discursive mode.