Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century

""Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century" identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in eighteenth-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve-"Let me be all, but my attention, dead"-embodies a wider aspiration in the period's poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes eighteenth-century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. It contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that has assumed a recent cultural urgency, and it repositions eighteenth-century poems as a collective model for assiduous reading and supple, wide-ranging attention"--