Both literary critics and historians say that the concept of “literary period” first came into existence in Britain during the Romantic “period” (Wellek, “Periodization” 484; Vogler 132; Blix 52; de Grazia 96-97; Chandler 108-110). As Thomas Vogler recognizes, though, to say “the notion of ‘literary period’ emerged during the Romantic period” is circular if not strictly speaking tautological, dating the emergence of a disciplinary object as an instance of that object:

If previous authors were aware of stepping onto the stage of history, Romantic writers were the first to see literary history as printed performance within book history.

    The period concept, as Wellek has shown, is “a section of time to which some sort of unity is ascribed” (485). A specious (Reider 26-29) or “imperfect” unity (Wellek, “Periodization” 485), the totality thus generated presents us with a homology of “the Author”: in critical discourse, periods are personified bits of time just as an author’s name personifies a “body” of texts. Like the figure of the Author, the concept of literary period unites history with style. It is “a time-section dominated by a set of literary norms (conventions, genres, ideals of versification, standards of characters, etc.) whose introduction, spread, diversification, integration, decay, and disappearance can be traced” (Wellek 484). One can see how necessary the notion of pervasive style to the idea of the literary period by contrasting it to the idea of the “age,” a politically and socially determined historical moment. Both Richard Hurd and Thomas Warton speak of “ages” of poetry: Elizabethan poetry is, Warton says, “commonly called the golden age of English poetry.”@Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry, 4 vols. (London, 1774-1781), 3.490, quoted in Wellek 482; Wellek also mentions Hurd’s “On the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth” (1759). Wellek rightly notes that, in contrast to the age, “the dependence of literary periodization on political and social history has [. . .] never been complete” (483).

    Thomas Hayward's 1738 collection of excerpts of poetry, The British Muse, might at first glance seem to periodize poems. However, it prints those excerpts "according to the Order of TIME in which they wrote; to shew the gradual IMPROVEMENTS of our Poetry and Language" (title page). Moreover, the collection does not collect works by author situated in historical chronology but rather by subject: it is "A Collection of Thoughts Moral, Natural, and Sublime, of our English Poets . . . The Whole digested Alphabetically under their respective Heads" (title page). Organizing poetry according to “ages” often, as here, implies evolution, but it can also imply devolution, even or especially if designated by the terms “neoclassical” or “Augustan” which implicitly claim similar but lesser greatness. In contrast to this notion of age, each period has its own specific criterion of greatness that differs from all the others and according to which canonical shortlists can be made.@Wellek differentiates the notion of “age” from “period,” but Robert Griffin productively intermingles the two.

    The birth of the concept of the period, I would argue, requires P. B. Shelley’s response to Thomas Love Peacock’s “Four Ages of Poetry.” Declaring Milton “to stand alone between the ages of gold and silver,” Peacock attacks “the Lake Poets” for faux-primitivism, for their “modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism” (762-763). For Shelley as for Peacock, primitive language was most poetical:

Primitive language is poetic because it provides “pictures of integral thoughts” or metaphors instead of mere “signs for portions or classes of thought” – which is to say, dead metaphors. Poets become more rare as time goes on because language devolves from poetry into dead metaphors: “new poets,” Shelley says, can and should “arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized” by becoming dead metaphors, too habitual to be felt as poetic and thought through as models of what they depict. Poets are needed to revive language for “all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.” The exceptional genius, the true poet, turns language back into the cyclic poem it once was by unearthing its primitive potential for the people of his age who have become immune to it (1073). Thus, when he answers Peacock in his “Defence of Poetry,” Shelley incorporates the primitive not as past historical moment but as present possibility.

    Shelley’s view pervades Romantic theory of the 1790s in Germany as well as analyzed by Simon Critchley: “the naïveté of romanticism [. . . .] is the belief in the possibility of producing a modern artwork that would be the peer, but not the imitation, of the art of antiquity” (102). The possibility of modern primitivism lifts the works of any of Shelley’s contemporaries able to cultivate it up out of their historical moment as expressing the time’s zeitgeist. For Shelley, “his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.” The Poet expresses his time or period by intellectually rising above it as “legislators or prophets” (1073).

    It takes a while for what we know as literary period to appear visually in tables of contents. The first volume of Chalmers’s 1810 Works of the English Poets, his Poems of Chaucer, includes an “Index” of all the poets’ names, organized alphabetically, whose works are collected in the 21 volumes. It indexes by name rather than organizing by period. Earlier volumes had at least organized poets chronologically rather than alphabetically, but mere chronology doth not a period make. In 1865, William and Robert Chamber’s Readings in English Poetry lays its contents on the table this way: “POETS: 1558-1649.” There is of course political significance to those dates, reigns and political upheavals delineated, but it differs from both Ellis and Headley in collecting beneath those dates exemplary poets with their imperishable works.

    The exchange between Peacock and Shelley took place in 1820-1821, though Shelley’s “Defence” was not published until much later (1840). It therefore participates in the process of immortalizing poets as exemplary of an age. This process involved channeling “non-canonical” poetry into collections that directly contrast with the disciplinary anthology. Subsidiary collections present poetry interesting for reasons other than their aesthetic value. The presence of one or two items of historical interest only in Southey’s 1831 anthology rather proves than disproves the rule of selecting according to aesthetic value: curious works of historical interest are tabled, confined to the historical kind of poetry collection. The contrast – bibliographic scapegoating, one might call it – is created visually and physically, by putting canonical authors at their own separate communal tables in their own separate types of text.

    Although Shelley’s argument with Peacock presents a conceptual basis for the notion of authors exemplifying periods, Shelley’s Defence does not give us a list of literary periods which are notoriously difficult either to define exactly or to do without. The protocols of the disciplinary anthology’s table of contents lay out a list of authors exemplifying their literary periods – that is, as subheadings of them. Since “period” is concept central to our discipline without ever really being definable, the notion is perhaps established less by disciplinary discourse than by habitual interaction with physical objects and habitual visual apprehension via specific print interfaces.

    Literary period becomes a disciplinary object when tables of contents map time onto space.@I get this idea from reading Blix, Chandler, and Lowenthal. The tables of contents in Hazlitt and Southey helped create the notion of literary period and, with it, our discipline: they participate in the creation of our discipline by transforming time (“century”) into the name for a list of objects (authors names, poem titles) laid beneath them in the physical space of a table-page.