Victorian

Victorian Poetry as Victorian Studies
Author(s): Stephanie Kuduk
Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 41, No. 4, Whither Victorian Poetry? (Winter, 2003), pp. 513518
Published by: West Virginia University Press
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STEPHANIE KUDUK / 513

Victorian Poetryas VictorianStudies
STEPHANIE KUDUK
It has become almost customary to begin discussions of Victorian
poetry with a lament. Whether the occasion is formal or simply that of
everyday conversation among colleagues, we tend to bemoan the low profile of the field, the misunderstandingsand inadequate attention to which
Victorian poets have been subjected, and the tyrannical dominance of the
field's neighbors, Romantic and modern poetry and the Victorian novel.1
Although many of the intellectual movements that initially gave rise to
this lament have passed (clearly we no longer feel the need to argue with
T S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks), the mood of pessimism has proved remarkablyresilient. Today, that structureof feeling is driven not by a widespreadcriticism of the aesthetic value of our subject but ratherby a curious
incongruity: while Victorian poetry was central to the life of the Victorians, it remains marginal to the study of modern Britain. We need to claim
for Victorian poetry a vital, pivotal place within the larger field- and to
make good on that claim, not by adopting the methods, hermeneutics, and
debates developed within the study of Romanticism or the Victorian novel
but instead by reshaping them.
Victorian poetry itself, and its presence in every arena of Victorian
culture and society, points the way forward. To say poetry permeated Victorian life is to insist upon a fact doubtless endorsed by most if not all the
readers of this journal, but it also is to remind ourselves about the deep
texture of the world we are engaged in trying to understand and describe.
Claims about the autonomy of the aesthetic realm notwithstanding, we
know that poetry and ideas about poetry were fundamental to the time.
This is true not of canonical verse alone but of all poetry, canonical and
forgotten, high and low, avant garde and conventional, hortatory and antididactic, philosophical and psychological. To recognize this is to see that
the importance of Victorian poetry to British studies rests not so much
upon the popularity or the intellectual reach of its finest writers as it does
upon the way they and their fellow poets together helped create their age.
The Victorian social whole was often imagined as a congeries of interconnected spheres, as a house with as many nooks and crannies and hidden
staircasesas the architectural style that took its name. The study of Victorian poetry can enter all these spaces of Victorian life.
To do so, we need to develop the interdisciplinaryand trans-generic
methods that are beginning to flourish in our field and to understand them
in a new way. The value of interdisciplinarywork resides in its dialectical
processes, its capacity both to enrich our analysis of a particular literary


POETRY
514 I VICTORIAN
text and to complicate our understanding of the topics, discourses, and
modes of expression upon which it bears. The outward movement represented by interdisciplinarity is most effective as an extended visit: for instance, when a study not only brings ideas about geology to the analysis of
In Memoriambut also brings Tennyson's ideas to the history of scientific
thought. Of course, this is easy to say and excruciatingly difficult to do.
Yet studies of Victorian poetry in particularhave had a tendency toward a
narrow and inward-looking conceptualization of their aims and ends, not
to mention an occasional stance of dogged resistance to the "trendy"preoccupations motivating work elsewhere in Victorian and British studies.
These tendencies no doubt emerge from, as they reinforce, a sense of the
marginality of the field. To the extent that this is the case, a simple reorientation in perspective and ambition alone may enable a richer engagement with largerdebates. Victorian poetry scholarshipdeservesan expanded
sense of the conversations in which it participates and a more capacious
understanding of the aims to which it is directed.2 Recent studies of aestheticism might serve as a model in this regard. In Linda Dowling's foundational Languageand Decadencein the VictorianFin de Siecle (1986), as in
more recent works such as Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho (1999), Talia
Schaffer's ForgottenFemale Aesthetes (2000), and the pieces in Schaffer
and Kathy Psomiades' collection Women and BritishAestheticism(1999),
poetry figures centrally in a scholarly project geared toward the
reconceptualization of Victorian culture from the 1860s into the 1890s.3
These works not only employ but actively participate in the study of gender, sexuality, language, linguistics, visual art, classics, material culture,
and nationalism and imperialism. They also are exemplary in examining
more than a single literary genre by exploring the conversation Victorian
poetry held with literary prose, drama, and, most unusually, the novel.
These and other excellent works of interdisciplinary scholarship in
Victorian poetry build on traditions distinctive to our field- traditions that
provide a foundation of unique insights and approaches for future scholarship. The field's strong connection to intellectual history, for instance,
can bring new perspectives to Victorian studies, with its emphasis on social history, realist novels, and the texture of everyday life. Studies of Victorian poetry have long drawn on, and sometimes doubled as, histories of
ideas, from the seminal work of Walter Houghton, in The PoetryofClough
(1963) and The VictorianFrame of Mind (1957), which devotes more atsuch as Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson
tention to "artist-thinkers"
than to the Brontes and Charles Dickens, to the recent scholarship of
Matthew Campbell and Stefanie Markovits, which is guided by a vision of
poets as thinkers engaged with the intellectual currents of their day.4 By
pursuing this connection with intellectual history, scholars of Victorian


KUDUK
STEPHANIE
1515
poetry are playing a role in pushing historicist approaches in new directions, expanding the scope of topics and contextual materials that "count"
as history for the purposes of fulfilling FredricJameson'sinjunction to "always historicize."5 This expansion occurs within the context of the reinvigoration of intellectual history across the humanities, offering a golden
opportunity for Victorian poetry scholars to set the terms for a new series
of debates about historicist methodologies and the relation between literature and its moment. The study of Victorian poetry also is distinguished by
the long-standing and vital conversations it enjoys with the history of art
and philosophy. These dialogues reflect the close connections of Victorian verse itself to painting, aesthetic theory, and philosophical discourse,
and they also point the field of Victorian studies toward largelyunexplored
terrain. Fascinating issues remain to be explored in these areas, especially
beyond the mantles of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Ruskin, and
John Stuart Mill. Through engagement with the philosophy of language,
for example, we can reassert poetry as a unique window onto linguistic
meaning, and at the same time engage in a dialogue with those who are
dedicated to the rigorous philosophical analysis of how language works.6
We can learn much, too, from what we might call an interdisciplinary
formalism, exploring for instance the similarities and differences between
the techniques of Victorian painters and poets, the ways they announce
their forms and interrogate the rendering of "reallife" and abstractideas in
an artistic plane, be it the ode or the two-dimensional surface of a canvas.
As this last point suggests, the outward movement of interdiscipliand trans-generic scholarship is also an inward movement, a returnnary
ing to the formal matters of Victorian poetry. This return through
interdisciplinarity to what Susan Wolfson calls the "formal charges" of
poetry helps us to see the poems we study in new ways, and to ask new sets
of questions about them.7 One such set of questions that I believe holds
particularpromise for future research involves the eclecticism and breadth
of the theories of poetry expressed within Victorian poems themselves.
Every Victorian poem contains a theory of poetry and its role in the modern world. We are less practiced at seeing a theory of verse in Victorian
poems than in Romantic and modernist ones, in part because those periods are defined in terms of a well-established group of aesthetic ideas (ideas
which, while not conclusive or exhaustive, have amassed a scholarly consensus that helps us to recognize them- when one speaks of the "Romantic ideology," others know what one means). No such group of distinctively Victorian theories of poetry has achieved a similar canonical status.
But this is so much the better for us. Instead, we have the bewildering
variety of aesthetic ideas that appear in Victorian poems, from Gerard
Manley Hopkins' innovative theories of instress and inscape, or Sydney


POETRY
516 I VICTORIAN
Dobell's strangely intriguing "spasmodic"
school, to Arthur Hugh Clough's
and Algernon Swinburne'sreconceptualizations of Romantic and classical
principles of political verse and prosody. When we have examined these
ideas in past scholarship, the danger has been to mistake variety for
balkanization, to see a collection of individual authorial idiosyncrasies or
styles rather than coherent theories of aesthetics. Not only do Victorian
poems present such theories, they offer ideas about art and its relation to
society that are emphatically connected to largerbodies of thought, a bounty
that includes liberalism, nationalism, utilitarianism, economics, physics,
geology, linguistics, Spenserian social science, physiology, and theology.8
Victorian poems contain a record of how ideas about art- and also about
art as a vehicle for ideas about politics, people, and society- percolated
through the Victorian world, how the theories of Ruskin and William
Wordsworth and John Henry Newman and Thomas Paine were understood, employed, and reworked by practicing poets and readers in all the
spaces where poetry flourished. To trace this process, we might ask about
how Ruskin's productivist aesthetic was seen to confer value upon poetry,
in which the craftsman ideal struggledfor prominence against the pressure
of vatic and bardic conceptions of the poet. We know very little about the
politics and ethics of art for art'ssake among politically committed poets,
or among poets whose writing was a practice of religious devotion. We
have much to learn about the interactions between formal strategies and
social, political, and intellectual questions, for instance about how Victorian poets understood the structures of poetic meaning-making that they
inherited from classical and Renaissance prosody, such as chiasmus, elision, or ploce, in light of the ways that modern linguistics was beginning to
theorize grammarand language history was reconceptualizing words.
The study of literature ought never lose sight of the literariness of its
texts, not because the aesthetic is sacred or inviolable, or even because it is
beautiful, but because the capacity of literature to act in the world cannot
be separated from the formal nature of its meaning-making. While this is
true of all works of art, it is a truth Victorian poems enunciate with particular energy. To do justice to this enunciation, we have needed, and continue to need, to be both Victorianists and scholars of poetry, fluent in
both an interdisciplinaryand historicist idiom and in the dialect of formalism. The study of Victorian poetry, as a result, has the capacity to reinvigorate the interplay- and set aside the tension - between formalist criticism, historicist criticism, and cultural studies.9 As new historicism slowly
makes way for the methodology that will succeed it, scholars of Victorian
poetry are well poised to chart a course for the future of Victorian studies,
the study of modern Britain, and literary and cultural studies more generally. This course can draw on the strengths of our interdisciplinary and


STEPHANIE KUDUK 1517
formalist approaches, on the vitality and centrality of Victorian poems to
modern British culture and society, and, I hope, on a well-deserved sense
of ambition and optimism within the field itself.

Notes
1

2

3

4

Thus Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (New York:

as
Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-2: "The Victorianperiodhas alwaysbeen regarded isolated between two periods,Romanticismand modernism.Thus Victorianpoetryis
seen in termsof transition. It is on the waysomewhere. It is either on the wayfrom
Romantic poetry,or on the way to modernism. It is situatedbetween two kinds of
excitement, in which it appearsnot to participate.... So the majorcritical and
theoretical movements of the twentieth century have been virtuallysilent about
Victorianpoetry. New criticism . . . consideredVictorianpoetry to lie outside its
categories[, as did ] RaymondWilliams. . . [and]feminism. . . [and]deconstruction.
No majorEuropeancritic has seen Victorian poetry as relevant to his or her purand
Poetics(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
pose."Or CarolT. Christ, Victorian Modern
Press, 1984), pp. 1-2: "ToEzraPound the VictorianAge, like the rest of the nineteenth century,was'a ratherblurry,
messysortof a period,a rathersentimentalistic,
mannerishsortof a period.' T. S. Eliot, too, dismissesthe Victorians.. . . The antiVictorianismof the chief Modernistpoets is well known, in largepart because it
was incorporatedinto the New Criticalvision of poetic history.. . . The Victorians
provide [Cleanth Brooks]with the most extreme example of the poetic failureshe
describes.. . . Recent scholarshipin literaryhistoryhas largelyfollowed the pattern
which Brooks[established].There has been an elaborateand subtle revaluationof
the complex relationshipbetween Romanticand modernpoetry.. . . But the poetry
of the Victorianshas been either neglected in these discussions... or assimilatedto
the Romantic tradition." Or Tess Cosslett, Victorian
WomenPoets,ed. and intro.
TessCosslett (New York: Longman, 1996), p.l: "I recently bought a copy of the
. . . NortonAnthology Poetry. I was disappointed,but not reallysurprised, find
to
of
that it containedonly five poemsby EmilyBronte,threeby Elizabeth
BrownBarrett
ing, and eight by Christina Rossetti. Other Victorian women poets, such as AugustaWebsteror Michael Field, were not representedat all." Even Tennysonand
recovered"
from the processby which "greatVictoBrowninghave only "partially
rian reputationswere gleefullydeflatedby the Modernists" 1).
(p.
Recent calls for entirely abandoningthe terms"Victorian" "Victorianpoetry"
and
include IsobelArmstrong,"When Is a VictorianPoet Not a VictorianPoet?Poetry
and the Politics of Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century,"VS 43, no. 2
(2001): 279-292.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Princeton:

Princeton Univ. Press, 1986); YopiePrins,Victorian
(Princeton:Princeton
Sappho
Univ. Press, 1999); TaliaSchaffer,The Forgotten
Female
Aesthetes
(Charlottesville:
Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000); and Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades,eds.,
Womenand British
Aestheticism
(Charlottesville:Univ. Pressof Virginia, 1999).
Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian
Frameof Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press,1957) and The Poetry
(New Haven:
ofClough: An Essayin Revaluation
Yale Univ. Press, 1963); Matthew Campbell, Rhythm Will in Victorian
and
Poetry
(Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1999); Stefanie Markovits,"ArthurHugh


POETRY
518 / VICTORIAN

5
6

7
8

9

Clough, Amoursde Voyage,and the Victorian Crisis of Action," NCL 55, no. 4
Frameof Mind,p. xvii.
(2001): 445-478. The quotation is from The Victorian
FredricJameson, The PoliticalUnconscious: Narrativeas a SociallySymbolic
Act
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 9.
To do so will requireus to counter the implications of semiotic analysis, which
largely dethroned poetry from the privileged position it enjoyed in the work of
earlier scholars of language. For a prominent recent example of scholarshipof
poetry engaged with philosophical analysis of language, see Marjorie Perloff,
and
Ladder:PoeticLanguage theStrangeness theOrdinary
of
(Chicago:
Wittgenstein's
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
Susan Wolfson, FormalCharges: The Shapingof Poetry in BritishRomanticism
(Stanford: StanfordUniv. Press, 1997).
Excellent workon these and similartopics hovers aroundthe edgesof the field, for
Plots:Evolutionary
in
Narrative Darwin,
instance Gillian Beer on science, Darwin's
Fiction(Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press,
GeorgeEliotand Nineteenth-Century
2000); Jonathan Craryand Nancy Armstrongon visuality, Techniques the Obof
in
server:On VisionandModernity theNineteenth
Century(Cambridge:MIT Press,
:
in
1990) and Nancy Armstrong,Fiction theAge of PhotographyTheLegacy British
of
Realism(Cambridge: HarvardUniv. Press, 1999); David S. Ferrison Hellenism,
SilentUrns: Romanticism,
Hellenism,Modernity
(Stanford: StanfordUniv. Press,
2000); RegeniaGagnieron economics, The Insatiability HumanWants: Economof
inMarket
icsandAesthetics
(Chicago:Univ. of ChicagoPress,2000);Catherine
Society
Gallagheron theoriesof culture,"Darwin,George Eliot, and Culture'sMalthusian
Turn"
(Locatingthe Victorians,
July1245, 2001:Science MusuemandThe Victoria
and Albert Museum,London); Suvir Kaul on nationalism, Poemsof Nation, AnVersein theLongEighteenth
thems Empire:English
Century(Charlottesville: Univ.
of
Fact:
Pressof Virginia,2000); MaryPoovey on accounting,A Historyof theModern
in
and
Problems Knowledge theSciences Wealth Society(Chicago: Univ. of Chiof
of
Writer
The
and
cago Press,1998); JenniferSummiton gender,LostProperty: Woman
History,1380-1589 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,2000); and
Literary
English
UnderPressure,1789-1832: Aesthetics,
John Whale on utilitarianism,Imagination
Politics Utility(Cambridge:CambridgeUniv. Press,2000).
and
Recent discussionsof the relationbetween historicistand formalistcriticismin the
wake of new historicismthat I have found helpful include Ann W. Astell, Political
in
Brown,
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,1999); Laura
England
Allegory LateMedieval
and
Fablesof Modernity:Literature Culturein theEnglish
Eighteenth
Century(Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press,2001); MarshallBrownand SusanWolfson, eds., Special Issue
on Formalist Criticism, MLQ 61, no. 1 (2000); Kaul, Poems of Nation; Katie
The
NovelandtheBritish
Bardic
Nationalism: Romantic
(Princeton:
Empire
Trumpener,
Princeton Univ. Press, 1997); and Wolfson, Formal
Charges,


Victorian

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