Victorian Poets E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Critical Reader
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 882

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader features a collection of critical essays focusing on various aspects of Victorian-era poetry from the 1830s to the 1890s.

• Presents key criticism on Victorian poetry
• Features contributions from a variety of scholars in the field
• Illustrates the full range of critical approaches to the Victorian poets, including attention to texts, words, forms, modes, and sub-genres
• Offers fresh reinterpretations, many driven by contemporary ideological interests, including gender questions, selfhood, and body issues

Leseprobe

Contents

Contributors

Introduction

1 The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry

Notes

2 The Mirror’s Secret

Notes

3 Browning’s Anxious Gaze

Notes

4 The Pragmatics of Silence, and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues

1

2

Notes

5 Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric

I

II

III

IV

Notes

6 Matthew Arnold’s Gipsies

The New Historicism

Intertextual Matters

Victorian Gipsies and “The Scholar-Gipsy”

The Acquisition of Cultural Power

Notes

7 A New Radical Aesthetic

Notes

8 Alienated Majesty

Notes

9 Fact and Tact

Notes

10 ‘A Thousand Times I’d be a Factory Girl’

I

II

III

IV

Notes

Works Cited

11 ‘The fruitful feud of hers and his’

1 Questioning the Subject: Dramatic Monologue

2 Androgyny

3 The Disappearance of the Object

4 Matthew Arnold

Notes

12 ‘Eat me, drink me, love me’

Sisterhoods and the Female Gaze

Goblin Market and Feminine Guessiness

Notes

13 Browning’s Corpses

Notes

14 A E Housman and ‘the colour of his hair’

Notes

15 Tennyson’s ‘Little Hamlet’

Notes

Works Cited

16 The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti

Notes

17 Stirring ‘a Dust of Figures’

Notes

Bibliography

18 ‘Love, let us be true to one another’

I

II

III

IV

V

Notes

19 ‘Poets and lovers evermore’

What’s in a Name?

‘The Fearful Mastery of Love’

Fleshly Love and ‘A Curve That Is Drawn So Fine’

Notes

20 Swinburne at Work

Anactoria

Notes

21 Naming and Not Naming

I. Becoming A Name

II. Not Naming, But Suggesting

Notes

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Victorian Poets : a Critical Reader / edited by Valentine Cunningham.         pages cm. – (Blackwell Critical Reader; 10)     Includes index.

     ISBN 978-0-631-19913-7 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-631-19914-4 (paper) 1. English poetry–19th century–History and criticism. I. Cunningham, Valentine, editor of compilation.     PR593.V57 2014     821′.809–dc23

2013038471

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Flora, details from tapestry weaving in wool and silk by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, with verses by Morris on borders, made by Morris &Company at Merton Abbey, 1885. Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester/ Bridgeman Art Library.Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

Contributors

Isobel Armstrong is Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Senior Research Fellow at the London University Institute of English Studies. An eminent scholar-critic especially of Victorian poetry, her publications include Arthur Hugh Clough (1962), The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (1969), Victorian Scrutinies (1972), Robert Browning (1974), Language as Living form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1982), Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics (1993), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to late Victorian: Gender and Genre (1999), The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Victorian Glassworlds (2008).Joseph Bristow is a Professor of English at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with strong lines on gender and gay writing. His books include The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona (1987), Robert Browning (1991), Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (1991), Sexuality (1997), Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (1997), The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005). His many editions include Victorian Women Poets: Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti (1995), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (1996, with Isobel Armstrong), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (2004), Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000), and Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: the Making of a Legend (2008).Timothy A J Burnett has retired from his job as a manuscript librarian in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, London. Writing as T A J Burnett, he is the author of The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy: The Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies (1981), and the editor of Charlotte Brontë’s The Search after hapiness (sic): a Tale (1969), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III: a Facsimile of the Autograph Fair Copy found in the ‘Scrope Davies’ Notebook (1988), and of The British Library Catalogue of the Ashley Manuscripts (1998) – the collection of the notorious faker-bibliographer T J Wise.Mary Wilson Carpenter is Professor Emerita of English, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She writes as a literary historian about Victorian literature with an emphasis on feminism and gender. Her main publications are George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History (1986), Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market (2003) and Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England (2010).Mary Ann Caws is distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of City University, New York. An art historian, literary critic, and biographer of Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Picasso and Salvador Dalí, she has edited anthologies on Manifestoes, Surrealism, and twentieth-century French literature. Her many translations of modern French poets include Stéphane Mallarmé.Carol T Christ became the tenth President of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts in 2002 after a distinguished career as Professor of English and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley. A strong champion of women’s issues and diversity, her critical interests have focussed on Victorian women poets and novelists. As a Professor of English at Smith she teaches seminars on science and literature and on the arts. Her books include The Finer Optic: the Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (1975), Victorian and Modern Poetics (1984), the Norton edition of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1994), and Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, edited with John O Jordan (1995).Valentine Cunningham is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and a Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His books include Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975), British Writers of the Thirties (1988), In the Reading Gaol: Texts, Postmodernity and History (1993), Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics (2011), The Connell Guide to King Lear (2012). He has edited The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse (1980), Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War (1986), Adam Bede (1998), and The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2000).Eric Griffiths is a Fellow in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. He teaches, and writes widely about, poetry from the Restoration to the present. Poetry of all sorts: like his critical father-in-the-faith Christopher Ricks, he’s a devotee of Bob Dylan. His books are The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989) and his Penguin edition Dante in English (2005, with Matthew Reynolds).Antony Harrison is Distinguished Professor of English at North Carolina State University, at Raleigh, North Carolina. An eminent Victorianist, editor, critical theorist and student of gender, his books are Christina Rossetti in Context (1988), Swinburne’s Medievalism: a Study in Victorian Love Poetry (1988), Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (1990), Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (1998), and The Cultural Production of Matthew Arnold (2009). He’s the editor of The Letters of Christina Rossetti (4 vols., 1997–2004), and coeditor of Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art (1992), The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (1999), and of The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002).Geoffrey Hill is widely regarded as the greatest living English poet. Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Religion at Boston University, Massachusetts; former co-director (with Christopher Ricks) of the Boston University Editorial Institute; currently Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He has published many volumes of poetry since his first, For the Fallen (1959). The best of his agonistic critical writing, amounting to a radically conservative, compellingly ethical and religious philosophy of literature, is generously gathered in his bumper Collected Critical Writings (2008).Gerhard Joseph is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. He’s a theoretically clued-up critic of modern literature with a special stake in Victorian writing, whose books are Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal (1969), Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver’s Shuttle (1992) and the edited volume Victorian Classicism (1982).Angela Leighton is a Professor of English, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University. A poet in her own right (Sea Level, 2007), she’s a leading feminist critic with main, though not exclusive, interests in the nineteenth century. Her books are Shelley and the Sublime (1984), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1986), Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), and On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word (2007). She has edited Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, with Margaret Reynolds (1995), and Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader (1996).Dorothy Mermin is Professor Emerita of English, Cornell University, with a concentration on Victorian literature and women’s poetry. Her main publications are The Audience in the Room: Five Victorian Poets (1983), Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry (1989), and Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (1993). She edited Victorian Literature 1830–1900 (2001) with Herbert Tucker.J Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature of the University of California, at Irvine (to which he moved from Yale where he was member of the so-called Yale School of deconstruction, which also included Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom). A very influential American deconstructionist, he started off as a rather straightforward literary-historical critic specializing in the nineteenth-century (best early book: The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, 1963), but from the later 1970s works of a deconstructive, and soon post-deconstructive cast (he was rather scarred like his colleagues and graduate students by the Paul de Man scandal), have poured out. Representative titles (and concerns): Fiction and Repetition (1982), Tropes, Parables, Performatives (1990), Ariadne’s Thread (1992), Topographies (1995), Black Holes (1999), Others (2001), For Derrida (2009), The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (2011).Christopher Ricks is William M and Sarah B Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, Massachusetts, and co-director with Archie Burnett of the Boston University Editorial Institute, which he founded. He was Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, 2004–9. Often hailed as the greatest living Anglophone critic, this very eminent scholar-critic and editor is extraordinarily prolific. He has produced major critical books on Milton (1963), Tennyson (1972), Keats (1974), T S Eliot (1988), Beckett (1993), and Bob Dylan (2003). The advocate of Johnsonianprinciples rather than criticaltheories, he’s the witty scourge of the over-solemn, the pretentious, and weak theorists. As well as his magisterial editions of Tennyson (one volume 1972; 3 volumes 1987– after the Tennyson family lifted its embargo against the quoting of the manuscripts), he’s producedInventions of the March Hare: T S Eliot Poems 1909–1917 (1996), aSelected edition of James Henry,The Complete Poems of T S Eliot (2011, with Jim McCue), and, among many other anthologies,The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) andThe Oxford Book of English Verse (1999).David G Riede is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A strong investigator of nineteenth-century literary production, with a concentration on the Victorians, his many books include Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (1978), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (1983), Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (1988), Oracles and Hierophants: Constructions of Romantic Authority (1991), Allegories of One’s Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry (2005). He has also edited Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1992).Herbert F Tucker is John C Coleman Professor of English at the University of Virginia. A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature with a close interest in the poetry of the period, he’s the author of many flashy critical articles in the area. His books include Browning’s Beginnings: the Art of Disclosure (1981), Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (1988), andEpic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008). He has edited Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson (1993), The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), Victorian Literature 1830–1900 (2001, with Dorothy Mermin), and Under Criticism: Essays in Honor of William H Pritchard (1998) – Tucker’s old Professor at Amherst, the composer of superior satirical songs about Theorists.Jennifer A Wagner-Lawlor is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies in the Department of Women’s Studies at Penn State, Pennsylvania State University. She writes on sonnets, parody, cultural context, women and utopia. Her books are (as Jennifer Wagner), A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet (1996); and, as Wagner-Lawlor, The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives (2000). With Barbara Ching, she has edited The Scandal of Susan Sontag (2009).Chris White is a former teacher of Literature at the Bolton Institute of Higher Education, subsequently Bolton University. She writes with combative force on homosexuality and lesbianism. With her then partner Elaine Hobby (now Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University) she edited What Lesbians do in Books (1991), and by herself the no-holds-barred Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook (1999).Ann Wordsworth taught in Oxford’s Faculty of English Language and Literature, especially for St Hugh’s College and the Department for Continuing Education. A spirited (and in Oxford terms a pioneering) theorist, she was one of the three 1970s founders of the Oxford Literary Review – the journal founded to ginger up literary study in Britain, but especially in Oxford, by promoting Theory and Theorists, not least Derrida and Harold Bloom. A keen Bloomian, she published many Theory-disposed articles and reviews , particularly in the Oxford Literary Review.Susan Zlotnick is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College, New York. She teaches and writes on the intersection of history and literature, especially in Victorian literature and in the case of women’s and working-class writing. She’s the author of Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution (1999).

Introduction

This collection of critical essays presents some of the Newest New Criticism of the Victorian Poets. It illustrates the range of new, or newish, critical approaches to this extraordinary body of poetry and poetics, tothepoets and their ways with their texts, their words, their forms, their modesand sub-genres. Here are Now re-readings and re-interpretations –contentious often (and often contended) – driven variously by contemporary ideological interests, including especially gender questions, selfhood and body issues, compelled too by recent textualities promoted by structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, all applied in critical practice to the grand, and less grand, masters of the traditional canon and to the newer arrivals in the now greatly afforced canon, women, homosexuals, regional and working-class poets.

The number of Victorian poets now demanding and getting reader attention, the canon of Victorian poets, the authors of the poems now on the syllabus, makes a vast crowd. The bulkier modern anthologies shout the story of currently accepted Victorian largesse – Christopher Ricks’sNew Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1990: 112 poets), Daniel Karlin’sPenguin Book of Victorian Verse (1997: 145 poets), my ownThe Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Blackwell, 2000: 158 poets). At the core of the canon, as they have been for a long time, are the two uncontestedly major figures, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victoria’s Poet Laureate, and Robert Browning. They’re the quality of the quality, assisted by a still highly regarded troupe of male producers: Gerard (Manley) Hopkins , Matthew Arnold and his friend Arthur Clough, Algernon Swinburne, A E Housman and Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy. A strong male band rather cleanly divided on educational, which is to say, class lines. On the one hand, the gentlemen poets from the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge – Tennyson and Fitzgerald (Trinity, Cambridge), Hopkins, Arnold, Clough and Swinburne (Balliol, Oxford), Morris (Exeter, Oxford), Housman (St John’s, Oxford), Wilde (Magdalen, Oxford), Bridges (Corpus Christi College, Oxford). On the other hand, the Others, who didn’t go to an ancient English university: Browning, D G Rossetti, Hardy, denigrated in their own time, and even after that, as not educated enough, too philistine and uncouth to be taken as seriously as the scholarly gents. But nonetheless a group comprising a coherent all-male school, until it was, as it were, forced to go mixed, with women admitted as literary equals, and sometimes more than equals. Notably, of course, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina G Rossetti, now thought of as very powerful women poets, a canonized pair more and more supported by a host of other women canonistas – the likes of Felicia Hemans, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Mary Coleridge, Augusta Webster, Constance Naden, Lizzie Siddal, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Margaret Woods, Amy Levy. Many of them, of course, bourgeois, even rather posh and well-off (like Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Alice Meynell), daughters of vicars (like the Brontës), comfortably-off wives (like Margaret Woods, wife of the President of Trinity College, Oxford, or Augusta Webster, wife of a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge), even undergraduates (like Amy Levy, who spent two terms at the new women’s Cambridge College, Newnham). Women put firmly on the literary map not least by anthologies such asVictorian Women Poets 1830–1900 (Dent, 1994), edited by Jennifer Breen, andVictorian Women Poets, edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Blackwell, 1995).

If not all that long ago the Big Four Victorian Poets were Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Hopkins, now – supposing it’s not too silly to go on talking in these terms – they are Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Though many critics and syllabus-makers would prefer that quartet to play as a quintet, with the fifth chair going to Hopkins, or Swinburne, or Wilde. (My own preference is for Hopkins.) Women critics, and feminist criticism, are, of course, largely responsible for the strong upgrade of Barrett Browning, Christina G, and the other women canonistas. And it’s modern shifts of critical interest and ideology, of Theory in other words – the latest moves in the ever shifting, shoving, tilting, switching politics of reading, of literary history, of canon-making – which are responsible likewise for the other party and partisan inclusions in the Victorian canon, as well as for the recent/recentish re-readings, re-envisionings of established canon members.

The present presence of so many proletarian poets in the canon, for example, is the result of potent Marxist and Marxized critical preachments, especially, though not exclusively, as they draw breath in the long shadow of revived historicism, the so-called New Historicism. The House of Poetry now gives bed and board to lots more residents than heretofore, the onetime poetic homeless, rescued from the aesthetic ghetto, working men and women from the provinces, from proletarian quarters of cities, the field, factory and mine, the loom and the kitchen-sink: Ebenezer Elliott the ‘Corn-Law Rhymer’; John Clare the poor-boy ruralist; Thomas Cooper the Chartist; charity-boy James (‘The City of Dreadful Night’) Thomson; Ebenezer Jones another Chartist; Gerald Massey, the ‘Red Republican’, son of illiterate bargee parents put to work thirteen and a half hours day in a silk mill at the age of eight; Joseph Skipsey, Northumberland coal-miner; John (‘Thirty Bob a Week’) Davidson; blind Scottish spinner and weaver Janet Hamilton; self-educated Eliza Cook; the ‘Factory Girl’ from Glasgow, Ellen Johnston; Dundee ploughman’s daughter Elizabeth Duncan; Ruth Willis, lame Leicester factory worker; Mary Smith, the one-time domestic servant from Cropredy, Oxfordshire; and so on. (Sterling propagandizing and availability of poems in Brian Maidment’s compendiumThe Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-Taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (1987) and Florence S Boos’sWorking-Class Women Poets in Britain: An Anthology (2008).)

The hand of Michel Foucault is to be felt everywhere in these canonical recruitments. His Marxized historiographical criticism, all about the rescue of the subjugated, the disregarded and the disapproved, from under the oppressive gaze of marginalizing power, has had great critically recreative effect. It has revitalized older feminisms of course, and is uniquely responsible for the massively important Post-Colonial and Queer Studies of recent times. The post-colonial awareness, which has attended to the blackness of the West Indian Creole Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the woman liberated by feminist criticism from her house-arrest as ‘The Mad Woman in the Attic’, nowadays homes in on the blackness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of her husband Robert Browning, and for that matter, of Alice Meynell, all offspring of miscegenated planter families in the West Indies. It has made attending to the orientalism of Tennyson’s Maud a sine qua non of reading that poem now. Queer (or Q) criticism, a main branch of the big field of modern gender studies, has resulted in the canonizing of once ignored homosexual poets – chief among these the pair of lesbians Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper writing under the name of Michael Field (important not least for their major part in the significant Victorian poetic cult of Sappho, whose female pronouns for the desired beloved they restored in their translations and adaptations; ‘my two dear Greek women’ Browning called them, with large liberal affection). Q studies are also responsible for the way long well-regarded poets Hopkins and Housman and Wilde have been as it were officially re-branded, re-stamped, as gay poets (their homosexuality and homoerotic interests coming to matter as much as if not more than anything else that matters about them). Q interests have made sure that the homosexual tenor of Tennyson’s cult of his dead friend Arthur Hallam will be given what’s now thought of as due prominence.

So: new readings, new scenes and focusses of reading, and new toolsfor reading. The politicized considerations that have burst the old canon’s banks to let in onetime occluded and marginalized, even excluded writers – women, homosexuals, proletarians, the poor and the proletarian, miscegenated women in the attic, political and religious dissenters and nonconformists, the regionally accented, dialect speakers, the many far from and short on what Matthew Arnold, Oxford’s massively influential Professor of Poetry, praised as ‘the tone of the centre’ – have released for critical attention, indeed made mandatory attention to, literature’s dealings as subject matter with questions of gender and race, as well as sharpening up the attention paid to class (that rather long-established British critical interest: less so, traditionally, in the USA). All this is a grand politicizing and historicizing, which inevitably motor an awkward-squad nagging away at the doings of power, and at how selves, persons, their bodies as well as their minds and souls, people in their skin as well as in the societies they inhabit and compose, are, as they say, ‘constructed’ in literature. This is to see literature, in other words, as a main actor in what MichelFoucault called the ‘discourses’ that collaborate to imagine and so create persons and societies. ‘Discourses’, because Foucault recognized the collaboration in these imperious ideological doings of all forms of textual activity. Texts of all kinds, medical, political, religious as well as fictional; art of all sorts, especially in Victorian times painting and the latest medium of representation the photograph, but all modelled on writing, the stuff of literature, which gives literature a main place in these considerations. And Foucault’s political analyses greedily, and for his time naturally, inhabit what we now think of as the mid-twentieth-century ‘linguistic turn’, that granting of precedence to language and its ways in all thinking about cultural production. The textuality, the linguistic work, the rhetoric, metaphoricity, the ‘figurality’, of the historical, empirical, ideological: it’s a contentious convergence, obviously; in fact, a difficult marriage teetering always on divorce.

The linguistics in question, of course, is that of the most influential linguist ever, the great Ferdinand de Saussure in his early twentieth-century lectures, which became his (posthumous) Cours de Linguistique Générale, the famous Course of General Linguistics. The linguistics that gave rise to structuralism, and eventually post-structuralism, to the idea of literature, and literary practice, as being above all self-reflexively about itself as writing, the way the text works, the internal play of its words as such, as (in de Saussure’s terms) signifiers, not signifieds (or signata), that is words pointing to the world outside. In other words,texts as systems of verbal difference rather than reference. The assumption being that a poem is a self-mirroring space, utterly inward looking – abysmal, as the code has it, that is plunging for meaning deeper and deeper into its own textual self. Hotly self-referential, intra-textual, the poem on this view does as it were squint beyond itself, but always in a textually constrained way: it has outside relations, but with other writings, the writings near and distant, which generate it and which it generates, its ‘intertextual’ relations. And, according to the influential German theorist, Wolfgang Iser, the text’s self-subjectivity builds in possible ways of reading it – ‘implicit’ or ‘implied’ readings, which in effect construct an ‘implicit’ or ‘implied’ reader. All in all, though, this is the autotelic text, influentially refigured by Jacques Derrida as ‘deconstructive’, that is made of language at war with itself, with language’s ancient and persisting desire for presence and fullness of meaning, for reference to the world; and so here language is stuck on a border, a threshold, where access to meaning and value is frustrated, even barred. The Derridean word for this is aporia: the aporetic text.

Such textual/intertextual assumptions have animated literary criticism, and not least the reading of Victorian poetry, as much as, if not more so than, the pressing ideological concerns. Together they comprise the interests of what is known as Theory. Interests that are not as innovatory as they are sometimes claimed, but which have certainly been strongly renovatory. Literary criticism proceeds historically, of course, by from time to time refuelling and retooling the persistent Basic Trio of critical concerns, the Big Three (as old as Aristotle) of text-producer, produced text and its meanings, and the contexts of production. Literary criticism survives by, thrives on, such shifts. But they are Turns, rather than Breaks. So that contemporary reading practice is always more of a palimpsestic blending than a case of cleanly wiped slates. But still the recent renovations, ideological and textual, have been so loud and deep and wide as to suggest more breaking than mere turning. And resistance to critical renoving (Joyce’s portmanteau word for modernism’s paradoxical mix of removing and renewing), though historically normal , has never been so strong as recently, because the renovators’ polemics about literary ideologies and the ways of textualizing have never, perhaps, been so fierce. Never before so much blood on the coal, which means never such interesting critical times as now.

The business of this collection of essays is to show some of the new Theorized, and post-Theory, ways of reading Victorian poetry in action, the engagement with the now stretched canon, the application of renovating ideological and textual insistences to canonistas old and new. It welcomes the polemics, the partisanships, on behalf of the new, but also the resistances: that is, the serious contending and argumentativeness of current critical proceedings. Above all it wants to illustrate the exciting range of current critical attention, the bustling play of the exhilaratingly various possibilities of things to notice, things to say, ways of thinking and saying them, now available to readers of Victorian poetry.

In ‘The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry’ Gerhard Joseph, enthusiastic Derridean, explains the notion of abysmality, connecting it with Derrida’s concept of différance (a dual term Derrida coined to denote language as a practice of difference, words as fields of meaning, and of deferring, words as slippery evaders of your grasp as they retreat down the signifying plughole), and linking it with the large practice of self-echoing, self-mirroring, repetivity in poems by Tennyson, Browning and Arnold. Joseph doesn’t want precisely to argue that Victorian poets are post-structuralists avant la lettre, but he is arguing the strong applicability to them of abysmality. Characteristically of a lot of users of postmodernist assumptions Joseph is at pains to suggest abysmality has, in practice, a long and established history; not unknown to older criticism (think, e.g., Tristram Shandy) but needing recent Theory to give it due prominence.

There’s more textual mirroring and echoing in ‘The Mirror’s Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Double Work of Art’ by J Hillis Miller’s, doyen of Anglophone deconstructionism (personal friend and colleague of Derrida; founder member of the so-called Yale School of Criticism in which Derrida was a member; in many ways Derrida’s echo-chamber): treatment of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems about mirrors and which are verbal mirrors of his own paintings, as the paintings are mirrors of the poems – paintings in the mirror of poems, and vice versa. A strong case of modern ekphrastic analysis, that is critique of poems about paintings (ekphrasis: the literary description of a ‘plastic’ work of art), poems that are now not uncommonly taken as prime examples of the textually self-mirroring, ‘post-modernist’ poem. John Hollander, the most thorough analyst of ekphrastic poems, gets an honourable mention.

Three takes follow on what literary history has long accepted as the main sub-genre of Victorian poetry, namely the great Victorian poetic practice of the dramatic monologue. In ‘Browning’s Anxious Gaze’ Ann Wordsworth seeks to shake any sense of successful outcomes for the dramas of perception mounted by the mode’s greatest exponent Robert Browning. She reads the anxieties powering Browning’s gazing narratives through the lens of Lacan’s insistent problematizing of the gaze, but especially with the help of Harold Bloom’s influential thoughts about the anxieties of poetic influence, the ephebic, successor poet’s struggle with his strong predecessors. (The piece first appeared in the collection of critical essays in the Robert Browning volume of the Prentice-Hall Twentieth Century Views series, edited by Harold Bloom himself with Adrienne Munich.)

In ‘The Pragmatics of Silence and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues’ Jennifer A Wagner-Lawlor inspects the handling by the mode’s greatest exponent Robert Browning of what tradition accepts is an absolute of the form, namely the silence of the monologuist’s addressee. For Wagner-Lawlor this silence is central to the animation, the construction, of the reader as this poetry’s main subject – the implied reader (and the implicit readings) of Iserian instantiation. This reader is stuck in enticing, suggestive, but frustrating ‘dialogue’ with the poem, as the original addressees are held in their irkingly loaded silence by their unstoppable addressers. So the dramatic monologue becomes a key modernist business: the poem presenting its subject as ‘figuration’, metaphoricity, rhetoric, of course, and in the matter of what a literary text is held, modernistically, to be all about – silence, the withholding of certainties, the insistence upon enigma rather than revelation. As Wagner-Lawlor notes, John Ruskin cantankerously accused Browning of being gratuitous and self-indulgent about: utterly missing what is for her Browning’s uncannily far-reaching linguistic and poetic principle.

For his part Herbert F Tucker’s ‘Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric’ offers an historical and critical repositioning of the genre of dramatic monologue (practised by Tennyson, but still mainly a Browning affair) as a form of lyric. Lyric for Tucker is an affair of over-hearing – intertextual overhearing, but mainly overhearing by persons – the implied hearers of these poems, and by us the poems’ readers (shades of Wagner-Lawlor’s concerns). What’s at stake in these poems is ‘the intersubjective confirmation of the self’: the dramatics of the lyrical. This, Tucker argues, was a great gift to the modernists, especially Yeats, Pound, Frost and Eliot – all exploiters of dramatic monologue. ‘Poetry became modern once again in its return to the historically responsive and dialogical mode that Browning, Tennyson, and others had brought forward from the Romantics’. (Dialogical is a handy, and still popular, term of approval in Theory-driven criticism – taken from the Russian critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin who notoriously applied it to the novels of Dostoevsky in order to bring them in from the cold, which Soviet Socialist Realism would assign them to.) Tucker is throughout keen to weigh Browning’s ‘lyricism’ within the history of its reception. He suggests that the personal concerns of Browning were why the dominant mid-twentieth-century New Critics, who valued impersonality in poetry and criticism, found Browning so awkward a case. Typically of some post-Theory reading, Tucker wants his story of a particular mode’s reception to be an allegory of the problems of reading that mode as such.

Antony Harrison’s ‘Matthew Arnold’s Gipsies: Intertextuality and the New Historicism’ looks at the gipsy poems of the extremely important poet-critic/critical poet Matthew Arnold, in particular ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, the poem rightly regarded as quintessential to Arnold’s poetic delvings into the role of the artist in Victorian times. This is an intertextual analysis conducted under the flag of New Historicism: the practice founded by Stephen Greenblatt of reading a literary text in parallel with non-literary texts, here non-aesthetic writings about gipsies; a practice which, according to Greenblatt’s original formulation, shows that a literary text’s main existence is within a ‘circulation of texts’ rather than bound into a relationship with real things outside the text. Whether Harrison succeeds in this is as moot as with any of Greenblatt’s own ‘new-historical’ readings. It’s a good try, though, even if here, as elsewhere, ‘New Historicist’ reading seems quite close to Old Historicism – old historicizing just writ a bit larger, or more shoutily. A common enough charge against ‘New Historicist’ proceedings.

In ‘A New Radical Aesthetic: The Grotesque as cultural critique: Morris’, Isobel Armstrong, experienced materialist and grounded feminist critic, grande dame in fact of Victorian poetry studies, looks at the poetry of Socialist aesthete William Morris in terms of a form his politicized poetry went in for greatly, the Grotesque. The Grotesque was a poetic mode defined powerfully, albeit despisingly, by John Ruskin, so Morris’s radical social and aesthetic theory is addressed in dialogue with Ruskin’s different and more conservative thinking. Morris’s volume The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems provides rich material for discussion of how ideologically contentious sex and sexuality play in Victorian poetry and culture; especially in the matter of hair, the most prevalent synecdoche of the body in Victorian poetry, a dominant of Victorian poets’ clamant obsession with the body – or ‘fleshly’ consciousness as contemporary body-aesthetics were labelled in Robert Buchanan’s stroppy attack on the Pre-Raphaelites and their ilk, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D G Rossetti’ (‘By “Thomas Maitland”’). A better example of the way this essay has ideology and form intersecting and interacting – embracing what Hayden White, the pioneer of (post)modern considerations of the rhetoricity of historiography, called The Content of the Form (his title of 1987) – would be hard to find. It finely justifies the claim of its title in Armstrong’s important Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) that Morris was engaged in ‘A New Radical Aesthetic’.

The important lecture by Geoffrey Hill, ‘Alienated Majesty: Gerard M Hopkins’, on Hopkins in relation to Walt Whitman , the American poet he was so greatly taken with, is a critique exemplary as a comparative study but also as an awkwardly forthright political one. Whitman the radical democrat, Hopkins the Christian Tory democrat: at first sight similar only in their shared homosexuality, but truly united, as Hill argues in his wonderfully gritty, lexically deep-digging fashion, in their shared interest in what Hill callscivil polity (a subject uniting many of the lectures Hill is giving as Matthew Arnold’s successor as Oxford Professor of Poetry). It’s a case pushing with canny strategy along, but against, the grain of much recent Hopkins criticism, which Hill plainly feels, if not gone totally astray, is at least often wide of the mark. Loudly rebuking here is Hill’s refusal to address Hopkins’s, or Whitman’s, homosexuality. That major preoccupation of recent criticism is, he implies, a diversion from the main track in reading either poet. Hill embraces Hopkins’s politics as a peculiar but still authentic democratic vision, in the face of the now common fleering at this priest as a hierarchical conservative despiser of tramps, the unemployed, farriers and such. And (at first surprisingly) central to Hopkins’s Whitmanite affinities is his dutifulness as a never not quite alienated Jesuit: the serious Roman Catholicism of the poet and the poetry cannot be discounted as some modern critique would prefer. Hill is here doing criticism in the modern way as massively political, but his is modern criticism reversed, in the mirror of the usual. Hill is as polemically aggressive as any of the implied critics he’s spurning, fights over their ground, but always from the opposite corner. This produces a conservative criticism by no means simplistic, whose wonderfully individualistic strength is to be differently radical.

My ‘Fact and Tact: post-Arnoldian Fact-finding and Modern Q Tactlessness in the Reading of Gerard Hopkins’ is a polemical piece (originating in a tribute to the scholar-critic-editor F W Bateson founder and General Editor of the great Longman’s Annotated Poets series, which brought out Ricks’s Tennyson, the Allotts’ Arnold, and the Woolford/Karlin/Phelan Robert Browning) suggesting as an essential principle and methodology for good reading a combination of the accumulation of facts, as advocated by Bateson’s favourite Matthew Arnold (’more and more’ fact), and readerly tact (heedful, lovingly attentive critical touch), as suggested by Christopher Ricks (the magisterial editor of Tennyson). The combination gets a test run in relation to the way Hopkins’s ‘Felix Randal’, a main Hopkins poem, and one touchingly about touching between men, has been read – on the one hand rescued from serious mistaking by the accession of facts about Hopkins’s farrier subject and the true meaning of key words in the poem, and on the other misjudged in tactless misprizing at the hands of strong Q critics Joseph Bristow and Gregory Woods.

Susan Zlotnick’s essay ‘“A Thousand Times I’d be a Factory Girl”: Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-Class Women’s Poetry in Victorian Britain’ is admirably pugilistic in its multi-focussed restoration work. It brings in from the critical cold the variously regional, dialect-speaking, proletarian, female domesticity, woman factory-worker subject and poeticity. Compellingly centred on the distinguished work of Ellen Johnston, the Scottish ‘Factory Girl’, this is radical feminist canon-busting. Its politico-historical-critical strengths include its feminizing of the traditionally male scene of regional dialect-speaking verse, and its moving pondering of the mountainous difficulties in the way of the aspirant proletarian housewife-worker poet.

‘“The fruitful feud of hers and his”: Sameness, Difference, and Gender in Victorian Poetry’ has Dorothy Mermin doing a classic job of what Jonathan Culler has called ‘reading as a woman’. Her big subject is gender in Victorian poetry: how sexual sameness, difference and androgyny play, in both male and female poetry. The great Victorian problematic is the speaking subject (focussed especially in dramatic monologues), and this for Mermin is a necessarily gendered matter. Her forte is the challenging sweeping claim. ‘In some important ways all the Victorian poets, male and female, can be read as women’.

Mary W Carpenter’s ‘“Eat me, drink me, love me”: The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market’ works with feminism’s favourite Christina Rossetti poem to bring out the poet’s, and the period’s, obsession with the variously sexualized female body, especially the body of the fallen woman (of great interest to Christina G in daily life as well as in her poetry). These well-aired (Victorian) contemporary moral and religious questions are shown to be heavily infected by assumptions about class and social hierarchy; by nationalist prejudices too, Carpenter thinks, since fallen Laura’s blondeness signs her as emphatically English. Hers is an English female body destroyed by sexuality – a nationalizing of the body provocation emphasized by the parallel Rossetti poem ‘In the Round Tower at Jhansi’, about an English officer during the ‘Indian Mutiny’ who shot his wife and then himself to save her from rape by the dark uprising horde. Here feminist critique segues adroitly into post-colonialist awareness: the obsessive Victorian body a terrifying pivot of multivalent fear and threats.

Entrancing body horrors are Carol T Christ’s concern too, in her ‘Browning’s Corpses’: focussing in particular Browning’s, and his period’s, necrophilia: the constant imminence of death in the poetry, and, in a time of fading faith in Christian orthodoxy’s afterlife, a clinging to poetic fictions of bodily resurrection.

Striking bodily matters, and in particular head-hair that especial focus of Victorian body consciousness, are the grave centre of Christopher Ricks’s subtly adroit ‘A E Housman and “the colour of his hair”’. Ricks’s concern is with what Housman might have meant by saying four times in his ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?’ that the gravamen of Oscar Wilde’s offence, the cause of his jailing, was ‘the colour of his hair’. Ingenious speculation leads to a paralleling of Wilde’s outcasting with traditional hostility to Jews for the colour, the stereotyping redness, of their hair. Ricks has been a loud Theory sceptic, declaring that what criticism needs is principles of reading not theories, and he is frequently linked rather with promoting the actual texts of Victorian poets than theorizing about them (and indeed, singlehandedly his unimprovable editions have made Tennyson’s poems available in all their detail forever; and his Selected poems of the Irish poet James Henry (2002) does a lovely resurrection job; and Housman editor Archie Burnett’s great (2007) edition of Housman letters is a product of the Boston University Editorial Institute Ricks and Geoffrey Hill founded, and which Burnett now co-directs with Ricks). But like Geoffrey Hill, whose poetry Ricks has enthusiastically promoted, Ricks enjoys nothing more than running onto the Theory pitch in order to show the Theory team how to score goals better. Housman, Wilde, homophobia, anti-semitism, the arbitrary making of outcasts to be scourged by oppressive authority: up-to-date concentrations don’t come more concentrated than this. But, of course, that anti-Theory Ricks is taking them up does indicate how unavoidable they’ve become.

In David G Riede’s ‘Tennyson’s “Little Hamlet”’ the huge Victorian emotional turmoil of mourning turning into melancholia, so central to the poets’ fraught engagement with the self, is cannily analysed in melancholic Tennyson’s work, especially ‘Maud’ (his ‘little Hamlet’) – the poem that with Tennyson’s In Memoriam and James Thomson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ makes up the Big Trinity of Victorian sadness poems. This is a finely instructive essay in its rich array of important critical engagements: particularly in relating Tennyson and the Victorians to Walter Benjamin’s classic account of Protestant (post-Hamletian) melancholy and its allegorical outcomes; in drawing out the imperialist and orientalist aspects of ‘Maud’; and in the consideration of Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’ indignations.

Different, though not unrelated melancholies, are the concerns of Eric Griffiths’ ‘The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti’, with its stress on the theology-driven, practical Christianity of her tortured selfhood, as she waited Beckettianly for the Second Advent of Christ, which never happened (hopes deferred, in Biblical words, making her heart sick). Here’s a continually astute close reading of Christina G’s poems, especially good on her verbal repetitions (hertwice-ness fondness). Griffiths reads with forceful, even tetchy, combativeness; this is criticism in the midst of contemporary debate. ‘Poems do not have insides and outsides’, as recent criticism believes they do. Feminist readings are put in their place. It’s wrong of Angela Leighton to offer Rossetti’s ‘doubleness’ as gender-specifically female: this is ‘normal also for male writers’. Isobel Armstrong is misguided to take Rossetti’s prosodic irregularity as revolutionarily feminist. Adrienne Rich mistakenly reads Rossetti’s religion as sexual ‘sublimation’ (Griffiths dislikes Freudianism). Importantly, he wants to get Rossetti’s religiosity straight (an often embarrassing subject for secularizing feminism), and he mainly succeeds – though his refusal to accept that thesisterhood aspects of Rossetti concerns, her large interest in nuns, for example, might be even proto-feminist does not carry a lot of weight.

Angela Leighton’s ‘Stirring “a Dust of Figures”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Love’ takes up Barrett Browning’s estranging and estranged discourse of love, in a demonstration where the normality of this woman’s great contribution to the Victorian ‘language of the heart’, to Victorian erotics (Leighton is right to oppose the modern cliché about repressed Victorians) cries out for, and gets, definition in its womanly distinctiveness. The impressively calm concentration – much of Leighton’s polemical force comes from her refusal to get heated – is Sonnets from the Portuguese, Elizabeth Barrett’s private courtship poems for Robert Browning. These poems, this poet, are shown ghosted by the ‘Mariana’ poems of Tennyson. Barrett Browning, a prisoner, in her own words, ‘scrawling mottos on the walls’, is offered as representing the imprisoned self of the Victorian woman poet: the poet figured as, and figuring in, distance, doubleness and foreignness (metaphoricized first as ‘Bosnian’ then as ‘Portuguese’). Her particular language of the heart: a kind of foreign language, certainly hard to learn, and like all foreign languages easily misunderstood.

In ‘“Love, let us be true to one another”: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and “our Aqueous Ages”’ the serious Q theorist Joseph Bristow brings together Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough as friends patrolling the fluid borders of gender, where their maleness is much troubled by fear of women and of emasculation. They’re as it were together on Arnold’s Dover Beach, site of the most famous watery margin of Victorian poetry’s many, worried by the female ‘bearded well’, the ‘Fuosich’ of the original title of Clough’s same-sex College-boy poem The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. The undergirding assumption is that gender is entirely an affair of self-making, as popularized by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick. Bristow disclaims wanting to present Arnold and Clough as a gay pair, but he certainly convinces about their shared fluctuating masculinity and their poetic intertwining (not least in the appearance of Clough, the ‘liminal bachelor’ as Kosofsky-Sedgwick calls him, as Thyrsis in Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gipsy’).

In ‘“Poets and lovers evermore”: the poetry and journals of Michael Field’ Chris White carefully complicates the nature of the writing of ‘Michael Field’, the most celebrated Victorian pair of ‘Sapphic’, lesbian, lovers and poets, too readily limited and simplified by the enthusiasm of their feminist enthusiasts. White’s critical force lies in her sense of the variety of discourses this pair of poets tried out in their never finally resolved quest for the ‘lesbian’ words to say it: classical scholarly (the translations and versions of Sappho), heterosexual, the language of friendship, Roman Catholic (at the end). White dwells sympathetically on the naming and self-naming issue around Bradley and Cooper’s choice of ‘Michael Field’, and is very informative in her literary-historical story of the deployment of Greek cultural precedent by Victorian gays of all genders.

Timothy A J Burnett’s focus is Victorian poetry’s most industrious sexual bad boy Swinburne at work on the notorious ‘Anactoria’, one of the most offending offerings in his publicly horrifying Poems and Ballads volume. This is a Sapphic poem, indeed, as relished by feminist and lesbian critics; but even more one steeped in Swinburne’s sado-masochistic fetishism after the Marquis de Sade. These sexual matters are revealingly approached by an analysis of Swinburne hard at work on the first page of his poem. This is close-up textual reading of Swinburne as a most diligently attentive wordsmith. It’s important to include in this collection of contemporary approaches because it indicates the kind of reception enabled now by the assiduously garnered textual data in modern editions (the Longmans Annotated Poets, Margaret Reynolds’ Aurora Leigh), as well as putting to flight, to the sword in fact, the old canard that Victorian poets were merely slapdash knockers-off of their verses. That was a lie especially hurtful to Swinburne whose onetime reputation as the ‘poet with the fatal facility’ gave him awful prominence among the slandered.

And, finally, a chronologically forward-looking discussion of what’s argued is the perennial and on-going poetic struggle with naming. It’s worked by Mary-Ann Caws and Gerhard Joseph through a look at the devotion of the Symbolist and ur-modernist Stéphane Mallarmé to High Victorian Tennyson – an attraction evinced not least in Mallarmé’s prose translations of Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ and ‘Godiva’. Richly Derridean in its interest in a normative aporetic convergence of naming and not naming, the piece is a very good example not only of the now large recognition of Victorian poetry’s effect and influence on modern/modernist/postmodernity, but of the proto-modernism of Tennyson (and many of his contemporaries). Modernists on this reckoning are characterized by their naming, which is also a refusal to name; and so also is Tennyson, the loudly ‘sonorous’ namer. A deceptive sonorousness, because it too, for all its audibility, is what T S Eliot, adapting Lancelot Andrewes, called the ‘word unheard’, the ‘word within a word, unable to speak a word’.

Style Note: the different practices of the original articles in spelling (English/American), use of inverted commas, and referencing methods have been preserved.

1

The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry

Gerhard Joseph

In recent French theory, the termen abîme describes any fragment of atext that reproduces in small the structure of the text as a whole. Introduced by André Gide in a passage of hisJournal in 1893, the phrase, which he intended as a characterization of his own reduplicative techniques, had as its origin an ancient visual device – that of the miniature heraldic shield enclosed within another shield whose shape and inner divisions it repeats exactly. There had, to be sure, been earlier examples of internal mirror effects in painting and literature – Gide cites the literary instances ofHamlet, Wilhelm Meister, and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”1 But in order to distinguish his own strategies from those of simple doubling, he felt the need to fashion a new critical term – “en abîme” – to indicate the idea of multiple replication. From Gide’s coinage in theNotebooks and exemplary practice inNarcisse, La Tentative, andLes Faux- Monnayeurs, it is but a short step to themise en abîme of post-Saussurean, post-structuralist theory, where we are invited to follow, in Jacques Derrida’s words, “a book in the book, an origin in the origin, a center in the center”2 beyond the inmost bound of human thought. In short, themise en abîme generated by Derrida’s elaboration of bottomlessdifferance uncovers a frame within a frame in endless replication – what one thinks of in more homely terms as the Dutch-Cleanser, Quaker-Oats or Morton-Salt effects of commercial packaging.

It is no accident that the concept was given its initial literary definition in the nineteenth century. In his famous characterization of “the Piranesi effect,” for instance, Thomas De Quincey recalls the play within a play inHamlet and compares this to a room on whose wall is a picture of that room, on whose wall is a picture of that room, on whose wall is a picture of that room . . ., and concludes that “we might imagine this descent intoa life below a life going onad infinitum” into “abysses that swallow . . .up abysses.”3 And Alfred Tennyson conveys to perfection what Gide meant byen abîme in the very context of Gide’s heraldic etymology: Lancelot’s shield in “The Lady of Shalott” with its image of a knight forever kneeling to his lady gives us in microcosm the larger structure of desire in the poem. That is, whatever its history in French theory and literature, the device, or something very much like it, also accentuated itself in English Victorian poetry in the auditory guise of the echo and the visual one of the mirror, sometimes in tandem. It demonstrated thereby the nineteenth-century English sources – Arnold’s tortured and unending “dialogue of the mind with itself” – of modernist reflexiveness.

The formal expression of man’s cognitive self-enclosure for the period is the dramatic monologue, with its limited aperture of the single personality’s straitened vista upon the world.4 The very narrowness of the “single window” in the monologue, however, makes for a compensatorily rich depth; the outer frame can compose a wildly proliferative inner cosmos, the receding strata of voices, for instance, within Robert Browning’s poems. As John Hollander suggests in his exhaustive study of the figure of echo in English literature, dramatic form is an implicit echo chamber whenever a speaker is made to echo a prior voice,5 the typical situation in Browning’s monologues. In the simplest and most accessible of the monologues, the speaker’s outer voice merely brackets a single interlocutory one – the Duke’s voice, say, in “My Last Duchess” containing the implied answers of the Count’s envoy. But more often that framing impulse leads Browning to the more dazzling rhetorical acrobatics which attract his sophistical protagonists, those “wheel within a wheel” replications their perverse, complex natures require, as his Bishop Blougram insists.6 At his most convoluted (and increasingly in the later monologues), Browning approaches the frame within-a-frame recessiveness that Erving Goffman has anatomized inFrame Analysis, his breakdown of social intercourse at its labyrinthine extreme where only the most patient of listeners can follow.7

While others may have their own favorite Browning echo chamber, my candidate for his most recursive Chinese-box instance – or at any rate the one easiest to exfoliate in brief as a paradigm for auditory regressiveness – is “Dîs Aliter Visum; or Le Byron de Nos Jours.” In this maddening tour de force, Browning’s Last Year at Marienbad, a woman addresses a famous French poet who out of timidity and a passion for respectability had refused to seize the moment of love with her ten years earlier. Then, they had met by a cliff brow at the seaside; now, she reminisces to him at a windowseat in an enclosed room. As quotation marks envelop quotation marks, point of view becomes ever more recessively entangled until, at the echolalial center of the poem, the woman is imagining what her lover would have imagined himself saying in reply to the speech (sts. xv–xvii) which he had just imagined her making had they indeed decided, as they had not, to marry! And the challenge to the audience becomes even more forbidding in such late monologues as Balaustion’s Adventure, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or Turf and Towers, or Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. Perhaps we have not yet reached, even in the most impenetrable of such later mazes, the systematic vocal dislocations of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute or the deepset games of R. D. Laing’s Knots. Arguably we are not quite at the seventh remove from the outer voice (“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “in print) where John Barth locates the innermost voice of his “menelaiad,” one of the auditory experiments in Lost in the Funhouse. But Browning is surely moving in such directions, and the pleasurable strain we experience in disentangling the voices of his intricate echo chambers prepares us for the late games of modernist theory and practice, for an epistemological vertigo that stages itself rhetorically as auditory confusion.

The original sound that the Victorian poet’s voice projects into the world is not of course inevitably indecipherable, or so the situations in some of Tennyson’s poetry assure us. In a brief, early Shelleyan phase, unmediated sound fills the soul of the Tennysonian bard upon the height (as in, say, “Timbuctoo” or “Armageddon”), from which remove he is able to “shake the world” with prophecy. The sound of the Dying Swan, one of Tennyson’s recurring images of the poet’s prophetic voice,8 flows forth into the world with such a bracing force, flooding an otherwise desolate wasteland with “eddying song.” But very quickly Tennyson’s artist figures suffer an “Icarian fall”9 from a semidivine to a human condition. As a result, prophecy now floats down from the heights upon a melodic stream to be received by such fallen or “cursed” maidens as Claribel, Mariana, and the Lady of Shalott – artist figures immured within a garden of the mind who try in their turn to reach an audience or a single auditor with their voices. As song flows out of the aesthetic garden, the important question Tennyson considers is how or even whether the bard’s inspired flow will be received by listeners in the cities of man. Tennyson conceives of a variety of answers to that question in the course of his career from the perspective both of the artist and of the audience, but for the sake of brevity, I will abstract first the positive and then the negative force of his notion of sound, especially of reverberative sound – i.e., the echo.

One of the critical truisms about Tennyson is that he is the poet of the remote in time and space, a poet of the “far, far away” – to echo one of his favorite echoing phrases. “It is the distance,” he maintained to his friend James Knowles late in life, “that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move.”10 If that recessional quality characterizes his visual sense, it informs his sense of sound as well. Sound like sight is most evocative when it is experienced at a “far, far” remove from the original source, and the appeal of echo over simple sound is that the former gives the impression of having traveled great distances, of having bounced off various surfaces on the way to the auditor and of having been rendered numinous in the process. Music, as it moves from the bugle in the lyric “The splendour falls on castle walls” (fromThe Princess), grows “thinner” and “clearer” the further it travels, the greater the number of wild echoes it achieves. That is, the artist’s sound may dissipate at its source – it is ever “dying, dying, dying.” But the very repetition of the word, like the repetition of “far” in “Far Far-Away” or “break” in “Break, break, break”11 denies that death since it implies an endless life in an answering nature and in the ears of distant auditors:

O love, they [the echoes] die in yon rich sky,   They faint on hill or field or river:Our echoes roll from soul to soul,   And grow for ever and for ever.

               (ll. 13–16 of “The splendour falls on castle walls”)