Abstract: This essay begins to imagine a theory of difficulty grounded in Romantic poetry but broadly portable into other eras and forms. On my account, the difficult Romantic poem deflects attention by saying more or less what it means, especially when what it means is to condemn features of the historical present. That is, its rhetorical and moral simplicity is lodged in an obvious antagonism to the disconcerting, mostly equivocal moods by which it is also saturated; the result is a suite of contradictions and a strong cocktail of responsibility, self-exposure, commiseration, and very uneven commitment, all on exemplary display in William Cowper’s The Task, a reading of which concludes my discussion. On the way I work through two distinct but equally suggestive notions of difficulty, one phenomenological and the other embedded in questions of canon formation, with particular emphasis on how highly tendentious, hegemonic representations of Romanticism limit how we understand Romanticism’s impact on experimental poetics in the present.

中文翻译：

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浪漫难度

摘要：本文开始想象一种困难理论，其基础是浪漫主义诗歌，但可以广泛移植到其他时代和形式中。以我的观点，这首艰难的浪漫主义诗歌或多或少地说出了什么意思，从而转移了人们的注意力，尤其是当这意味着谴责历史时时的特征时。就是说，它的修辞和道德朴素与令人不安的，大多是模棱两可的情绪形成了明显的对立，使它也饱和了。结果是一系列矛盾和强烈的责任感，自我暴露，同情心和非常不均衡的承诺，所有这些都在威廉·考珀的《任务》中得到很好的展示，我的讨论结束了阅读。在我通过两个截然不同但同样具有启发性的难度概念的过程中，