French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Leighton, On Form. Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word
Poetry and Poetics
Angela Leighton
On Form. Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word
Oxford University Press, 2007, 288 p.
ISBN: 0-19-929060-1
What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.
About the author:
Angela Leighton, Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge
Angela Leighton situates her study within the rich intellectual tradition of British aestheticism and poetics, tracing how the concept of form evolved from the Romantic period through modernism and into contemporary poetry. By examining works by major figures such as Tennyson, Walter Pater, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, the book engages with longstanding critical debates concerning the relationship between form and content. It approaches form not merely as a technical constraint, but as a dynamic musical quality and the very secret of artistic pleasure.
This book will be especially useful for students and scholars of literature, literary theory, and Victorian studies who are interested in the mechanics of poetic language and the history of aesthetic ideas. It addresses fundamental questions about what makes literature distinct and how critical practice can better articulate the enjoyment derived from texts. By investigating form as a ghostly yet vital presence in writing, Leighton offers readers a refreshed vocabulary for thinking about the enduring significance of artistic shape and structure.