A C OMPANION T O V ICTORIAN POETRY EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN, ALISON CHAPMAN AND ANTONY H. HARRISON

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1 A C OMPANION T O V ICTORIAN POETRY EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN, ALISON CHAPMAN AND ANTONY H. HARRISON

2

3 A Companion to Victorian Poetry

4 Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and postcanonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published 1. A Companion to Romanticism Edited by Duncan Wu 2. A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture Edited by Herbert F. Tucker 3. A Companion to Shakespeare Edited by David Scott Kastan 4. A Companion to the Gothic Edited by David Punter 5. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare Edited by Dympna Callagban 6. A Companion to Chaucer Edited by Peter Brown 7. A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake Edited by David Womersley 8. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Edited by Michael Hattaway 9. A Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas N. Corns 10. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry Edited by Neil Roberts 11. A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture Edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Trebarne 12. A Companion to Restoration Drama Edited by Susan J. Owen 13. A Companion to Early Modern Women s Writing Edited by Anita Pacheco 14. A Companion to Renaissance Drama Edited by Arthur F. Kinney 15. A Companion to Victorian Poetry Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison 16. A Companion to the Victorian Novel Edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing A Companion to Shakespeare s Works: Volumes I IV Edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard 21. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America Edited by Charles L. Crow 22. A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism Edited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted 23. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South Edited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson 24. A Companion to American Fiction Edited by Shirley Samuels 25. A Companion to American Fiction Edited by Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson 26. A Companion to Digital Humanities Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth 27. A Companion to Romance Edited by Corinne Saunders 28. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel Edited by Brian W. Shaffer 29. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama Edited by David Krasner 30. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture Edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia 31. A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture Edited by Rory McTurk 32. A Companion to Tragedy Edited by Rebecca Bushnell 33. A Companion to Narrative Theory Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz 34. A Companion to Science Fiction Edited by David Seed 35. A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America Edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer 36. A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance Edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen 37. A Companion to Mark Twain Edited by Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd 38. A Companion to European Romanticism Edited by Michael K. Ferber 39. A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture Edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar 40. A Companion to Walt Whitman Edited by Donald D. Kummings 41. A Companion to Herman Melville Edited by Wyn Kelley 42. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350 c.1500 Edited by Peter Brown 43. A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: Edited by Mary Luckhurst 44. A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry Edited by Christine Gerrard 45. A Companion to Shakespeare s Sonnets Edited by Michael Schoenfeldt 46. A Companion to Satire Edited by Ruben Quintero 47. A Companion to William Faulkner Edited by Richard C. Moreland

5 A C OMPANION T O V ICTORIAN POETRY EDITED BY RICHARD CRONIN, ALISON CHAPMAN AND ANTONY H. HARRISON

6 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd a Blackwell Publishing company 350 Main Street, Malden, MA , USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia Kurfürstendamm 57, Berlin, Germany The right of Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison to be identified as the Authors of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd First published in paperback 2007 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN (paperback: alk. paper) A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 1 / 2 /12 1 / 2 pt Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall. The publisher's policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary Chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:

7 Contents Editors Preface Notes on Contributors Chronology viii x xv Introduction: Victorian Poetics Carol T. Christ 1 PART ONE Varieties and Forms 23 1 Epic Herbert F. Tucker 25 2 Domestic and Idyllic Linda H. Peterson 42 3 Lyric Matthew Rowlinson 59 4 Dramatic Monologue E. Warwick Slinn 80 5 Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence Alison Chapman 99 6 Elegy Seamus Perry Hymn J. R. Watson 134

8 vi Contents 8 Nonsense Roderick McGillis Verse Novel Dino Felluga Verse Drama Adrienne Scullion Working-Class Poetry Florence Boos The Classical Tradition Richard Jenkyns Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism Antony H. Harrison Poetry in Translation J.-A. George Tractarian Poetry Stephen Prickett The Spasmodics Richard Cronin The Pre-Raphaelite School David Riede The Poetry of the 1890s Chris Snodgrass 321 PART TWO Production, Distribution and Reception The Market Lee Erickson Anthologies and the Making of the Poetic Canon Natalie M. Houston Reviewing Joanne Shattock 378

9 Contents vii 22 Poetry and Illustration Lorraine Janzen Kooistra 392 PART THREE Victorian Poetry and Victorian Culture Nationhood and Empire Margaret Linley Poetry in the Four Nations Matthew Campbell Poetry and Religion W. David Shaw Poetry and Science Alan Rauch Landscape and Cityscape Pauline Fletcher Vision and Visuality Catherine Maxwell Marriage and Gender Julia F. Saville Sexuality and Love John Maynard 543 Index 567

10 Editors Preface In England, the period from about 1830 until World War I is normally distinguished by historians as Victorian in honour of the longest-reigning monarch in British history, who dominated the era as a kind of cultural icon. These years witnessed an extraordinary flowering of literary culture, comparable in many respects to what occurred under England s other long-lived and remarkably influential female monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. Despite the virtual absence of significant drama produced for the stage during most of the Victorian era, every other genre flourished. (Much great dramatic literature did in fact emerge, but not in the form of stage plays.) The productivity of poets, novelists and writers of self-consciously artistic prose non-fiction remains, from the vantage of the early twentyfirst century, breathtaking. The work of the poets, on whom this volume focuses, retains its ability to enchant, amaze and inspire. Victorian poetry, as a vast and extraordinarily complex body of productions, employs every established verse form in the language and exploits every established poetic subgenre, while refining upon some, such as the dramatic monologue, the verse drama and the pastoral elegy, in ways previously unimagined. Produced by authors of both sexes in every social class from all districts in the British Isles (and indeed the colonies), it engages a remarkable variety of cultural discourses political, religious, social, economic and scientific in both direct and nuanced ways that still strike readers as highly original, and also aesthetically and ideologically powerful. Coming to critical terms with this diverse body of materials is a project that in itself raises many critical and theoretical issues, issues that the editors of this Companion have attempted to address openly in both the content of its chapters and its organizing principles. Readers of this volume will immediately notice its differences from some of the other Blackwell Companions, as well from other works that attempt in some way to present a critical or historical introduction to Victorian poetry. Instead of collecting essays that treat significant Victorian poets or poems individually, we have brought together specially commissioned chapters that reflect both the multifariousness of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches to it many of them richly informed by recent developments in textual and cultural theory. Thus, rather than presenting a single chapter on Idylls of the King, we provide readers with a number of chapters in which Tennyson s great

11 Editors Preface ix epic is discussed, along with other significant Victorian poems, in terms of genre (Tucker), marketing (Erickson) and reception (Shattock), but also within a variety of cultural contexts, such as Victorian medievalism (Harrison), Victorian concerns with nationhood and empire (Linley), and Victorian attitudes to gender (Saville) and sexuality (Maynard). A detailed topical index allows readers to trace such connections. This volume is thus designed, at one level, to demonstrate the ways in which a given poet or poem can be seen to emerge from a number of cultural matrices and participate in a variety of cultural discourses. At another, it seeks to explore the relationships generic, stylistic, thematic between work by different poets, and in doing so resuscitate a considerable body of poetry of the period that has fallen into neglect. In her introduction on Victorian poetics, Carol T. Christ offers a commanding overview of the whole period. The remaining contributions are organized in three parts: Varieties and Forms, Production, Distribution and Reception and Victorian Poetry and Victorian Culture. Part one surveys the generic range of Victorian poetry and the variety of its schools and styles. In part two the focus shifts from the form and content of Victorian poetry to the means of its production. Chapters deal with issues ranging from the new print technologies and the economics of the production of poetry to the structure of the marketplace, and to the influence of anthologies, lending libraries, illustration and reviewing on the reception of Victorian poets and their work. Part three attempts to position Victorian verse in what the editors see as crucial cultural contexts and to explore the interactions between the poetry and dominant cultural discourses. This book offers itself as a companion to a body of work most of which had almost disappeared from view in the mid-twentieth century, and much of which has still to attract the attention that it deserves. In the 1960s Victorian poetry had been all but reduced to the work of three poets: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. Gerald Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy remained, but by virtue of being enrolled as moderns before their time. The work of Victorian women poets had been effectively erased. Much has changed since then, and this Companion reflects that. But it seeks to do still more: to lay out an agenda for the study of Victorian poetry in coming years. It suggests, for example, that the work of women poets no longer needs special defence. It is treated here not in one chapter but in every chapter. This Companion maps areas that invite future research, in chapters such as Florence Boos s on Victorian working-class poetry, and it recalls to attention poems that remain unread, as in Herbert F. Tucker s chapter on the Victorian epic. In place of the tastefully minimalist shop window that the New Critics of the last century displayed to their readers, this Companion to Victorian Poetry offers a window that is richly and chaotically cluttered. But there is an appropriateness in that: Victorian shops after all had windows of precisely that kind.

12 Notes on Contributors Florence Boos, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, has published booklength studies of the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, and edited Morris s Socialist Diary and Earthly Paradise, as well as a more recent special issue of Victorian Poetry devoted to nineteenth-century working-class poetry. She is currently at work on a book on working-class women poets of Victorian Scotland. Matthew Campbell is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) and co-editor of Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics (1994) and Memory and Memorials, : Literary and Cultural Perspectives (2000). He is currently working on Irish poetry in the Union, , and editing The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry. He is editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin. Alison Chapman is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is the author of The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000). She is editing a collection of essays on Victorian women poets for the series Essays and Studies (2003) and, with Jane Stabler, co-editing Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (2002) and a special issue of Forum (2003) on Anglo-American expatriate communities in Italy. Carol T. Christ is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and until recently was Vice-Chancellor and Provost of that university. Her books include The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (1975), Victorian and Modern Poetics (1984) and Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (1995), and she has edited The Mill on the Floss. Richard Cronin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His books include Shelley s Poetic Thoughts (1981), Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1988), Imagining India (1989), 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (1998), The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (2000) and Romantic Victorians (2002).

13 Notes on Contributors xi Lee Erickson, Professor of English at Marshall University, is the author of Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences (1984) and The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, (1996). Dino Felluga is an assistant professor at Purdue University, West Lafayette, where he teaches nineteenth-century British poetry as well as theory and cultural studies. Articles of his have appeared in SEL: Studies in English Literature, Criticism, European Romantic Review and ARIEL. He is currently completing his first book, entitled The Perversity of Poetry: The Market, Romantic Ideology, and the Masculine Poet. Pauline Fletcher is a professor of English at Bucknell University and general editor of the Bucknell Review. Her publications include the monograph Gardens and Grim Ravines: The Language of Landscape in Victorian Poetry (1983) and, edited together with John Murray, Wordsworth in Context (1992), as well as numerous essays on Victorian poetry. J.-A. George is a graduate of Vassar College and King s College, London. She has taught in the Irish Republic and currently lectures at the University of Dundee, where she also runs the Mediaeval Drama Group. She has published on Old and Middle English language and literature, sixteenth-century drama, the Pre-Raphaelites and translation theory. Antony H. Harrison is Professor of English at North Carolina State University. He has edited The Letters of Christina Rossetti (4 vols), Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art and The Culture of Christina Rossetti. His authored books include Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (1998), Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (1990), Christina Rossetti in Context (1988) and Swinburne s Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry (1988). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently writing Matters of Taste: Victorian Poetry and Desire. Natalie M. Houston is an assistant professor at the University of Houston. She has published articles on Victorian women writers, nineteenth-century sonnet anthologies and the poetry of the Crimean War. She is currently completing a book on the cultural history of the Victorian sonnet. Richard Jenkyns is a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall and Professor of the Classical Tradition at the University of Oxford. His books include The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980), Three Classical Poets (1982), Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil (1991), The Legacy of Rome (1992), Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (1992) and Virgil s Experience (1998). Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Associate Professor of English at Nipissing University in North Bay, Canada, has published numerous articles on visual/verbal relations and

14 xii Notes on Contributors Victorian poetry. She is co-editor, along with Mary Arseneau and Antony H. Harrison, of The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (1999) and author of The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books (1995) and Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (2002). Margaret Linley is an assistant professor of English and member of the Print Culture Specialized MA at SFU. She has published on literary annuals, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. She is currently working on a book on Victorian poetry, the British nation and imperialism. Catherine Maxwell is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the editor of the Everyman edition Algernon Charles Swinburne (1997) and The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (2001). She has published essays and articles on Christina and D. G. Rossetti, Browning, George Eliot, Shelley, Ruskin, Swinburne and Vernon Lee, and is currently writing the volume on Swinburne for the series Writers and their Work. John Maynard is Professor of English at New York University, where he served as Chair from 1983 to He has published Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (1983) and Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (1993) as well as two studies of Robert Browning. He is co-editor of Victorian Literature and Culture. He is currently working on a project on reader theory. Roderick McGillis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of The Nimble Reader (1996), A Little Princess: Gender and Empire (1996) and Children s Literature and the Fin de Siècle (2001). He has recently published his first novel. His current work deals with the construction of masculinity in popular culture. Seamus Perry is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and author of Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999), editor of Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections (2000), and co-editor, with Nicola Trott, of 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads (2001). He is an editor of the journal Essays in Criticism. Linda H. Peterson is Professor of English at Yale University. She has recently published Traditions of Victorian Women s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (1999), as well as articles on Tennyson, Letitia Landon, Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cholmondeley. Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. His books include Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (1970), Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976), Victorian Fantasy (1982), Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986) and Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996).

15 Notes on Contributors xiii Alan Rauch, Associate Professor of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, researches the cultural studies of science in the nineteenth century. He is the author of Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (2001). His current projects include Private Reading: Public Knowledge, which focuses on nineteenth-century private subscription libraries and their role in the dissemination of knowledge, as well as a reprint of William Paley s Natural Theology. Rauch has also edited Jane Loudon s 1827 novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1994) and, with George Levine, One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (1987). David Riede is Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of 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 (1992) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited (1992). Matthew Rowlinson teaches English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Tennyson s Fixations: Psychoanalysis and the Topics of the Early Poetry (1994) and numerous articles on Victorian Literature. His current research links literary allegory and the history of money forms in nineteenth-century Britain. Julia F. Saville is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, specializing in Victorian poetry and the relation between nineteenth-century poetics and the visual arts. She is the author of A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2000) and various essays. Currently she is working on a book provisionally entitled Bathing Boys: An Aesthetics of the Male Nude in Victorian Literature and Culture. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her publications on Scottish cultural issues include articles in the journals Comparative Drama, New Theatre Quarterly and Theatre Research International, and essays in the collections Group Identities on French and British Television (2001), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000) and A History of Scottish Women s Writing (1997). She also works on early women playwrights and is the editor of Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century (1996). Joanne Shattock is Professor of Victorian Literature and Director of the Victorian Studies Centre, University of Leicester. She is editor of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, third edition, vol. 4, (1999), and has recently published Women and Literature (2001). She co-edits a monograph series, The Nineteenth Century, for Ashgate.