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Abstract

Creating Intersections Where None Exist: Lidner, Oxenstierna and the Unity of the Long Poem The article addresses the problem of literary unity as it is posed by two late eighteenth century long poems, “Året MDCCCXVIII” by Bengt Lidner and Skördarne by Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna. By investigating the relations between poetry, poetics and practical criticism, it seeks to document a situation in which new poems fail to achieve the kind of unity found in the epic poem. Instead, the poems are valued on behalf of their ability to seamlessly weave together disparate material, “creating intersections where none exist”, as one critic put it. The article then describes the reception of these poems during the romantic period, when literary unity was primarily understood in terms of “lyric” unity. What was at stake in the fragmentary unity of these poems, wedged as it were between two dominant paradigms of poetics?

Keywords

• Eighteenth-century poetry
• the long poem
• literary unity
• theory of genres
• fragment/wholeness
• transition/digression