Adorned: The Romantic Poetics of Ornament

Ornamental verses abound in Romantic-era commonplace books, albums, epitaphs, pamphlets, personal and commercial anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals—that is, in the repositories where historical general audiences read and recorded poetry. Today, by contrast, attachment to ornament is commonly dismissed as a defect of taste, often feminized. The result is that a vast and important body of writing from the golden age of general audience poetry reading has become illegible. Ale...