Untam'd Wing

The jazz term "riff" is short for "riffle"-"make rough." In Untam'd Wing: Riffs on Romantic Poetry, scholar/poet Jeffrey Robinson sets out much like a jazz musician to renew a great body of work (say, Miles Davis on George Gershwin)-"to recast," as he says in the Prefatory Note, "what have become monuments, with all the inertness of passive appreciation that monumentality encourages, into living forms." If he "roughs up" some of our long-time favorites, it's not to revise, and certainly not to improve, but on the contrary to reveal a timeless dimension that is of the very nature of the Romantic: "I would define a 'romantic' poem, of whatever vintage, as one that invites its own renewal in every present." With all the boldness and subtle care of the poets he celebrates, Robinson stakes his "life-long involvement as reader, teacher, and scholar/critic of Romantic poetry" on an equally committed "absorption and belief in the discoveries of modern and contemporary experimental poetry." Lik

Jeffrey C. Robinson Robinson has published widely in Romantic Studies. He is co-editor, along with Jerome Rothenberg, of Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry. A winner of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, he has taught at the University of Colorado in Boulder since 1971.