P OETICS EN PASSANT
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called The Spirit of the Age. Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Shelley s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison FORTHCOMING TITLES: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Regions of Sara Coleridge s Thought, by Peter Swaab Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson
P OETICS EN PASSANT R EDEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP B ETWEEN VICTORIAN AND MODERN POETRY Anne Jamison
POETICS EN PASSANT Copyright Anne Jamison, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61899-2 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-38170-8 ISBN 978-0-230-10125-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230101258 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jamison, Anne Elizabeth, 1969 Poetics en passant : redefining the relationship between Victorian and modern poetry / Anne Jamison. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-349-38170-8 (alk. paper) 1. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830 1894 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830 1894 Technique. 3. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821 1867 Criticism and interpretation. 4. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821 1867 Technique. 5. Poetics History 19th century. 6. Poetry, Modern 19th century History and criticism. I. Title. PR5238.J36 2009 821.8 dc22 2009006231 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my wonderful family and also C. H. P.
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C ONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Any Where Out of This Verse: Baudelaire s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression 19 2 Prose Combat : Baudelaire and The Press 53 3 The Victorian Baudelaire 89 4 Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti s Unusual Dead 123 5 Goblin Metrics 145 6 When I am dead, my dearest... : Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti 179 Coda 215 Notes 221 General Index 245 Index to Individual Works 259
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A CKNOWLEDGMENTS An earlier version of chapter 1, Any Where Out of this Verse: Baudelaire s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression, appeared in NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH STUDIES 29.3 and 4 (spring/summer 2001) and is reprinted with permission of the University of Nebraska Press. A version of chapter 4, Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti s Unusual Dead, appeared in Textual Practice 20.2 (2006). Material from chapter 3 appeared, in very different form, in Browning Society Notes 29 (2009) as part of conference proceedings from La Prude Angleterre: Victorians and France, Cultural Cross-Currents in the Nineteenth Century, organized by University College, London, and the Browning Society. Many thanks to Berry Chevasco for organizing such a productive conference. A brief review essay on material discussed in chapter 6, When I am dead my dearest... : Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti appeared with the same title as an alert in How2 2.1 (2003). All translations are my own except where otherwise noted. I gratefully acknowledge the support of teachers and colleagues at Princeton University, especially that of Claudia Brodsky, Stanley Corngold, and Michael Wood. Suzanne Nash, U. C. Knopflmacher, and Elaine Showalter provided invaluable early advice and help, as did long conversations about poetry with Evgeni Pavlov, Dan Blanton, Soelve Curdts, and Amy Billone, whose friendship and extraordinary sensitivity to poetry often sustained me. April Alliston was more instrumental than she knows, and Oliver Arnold, Eileen Reeves, and Cornel West all provided inspiration at key moments. I would also like to acknowledge research and travel support from the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, and the Graduate School, without which my work at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris would not have been possible. I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues at the University of Utah, especially Disa Gambera, Paisley Rekdal, Maeera Schreiber, Tom Stillinger, and Barry Weller for their careful reading and many wonderful conversations about poetry; Barry has worked hard enough to deserve a second salary. At a crucial juncture, Tom also performed
x A CKNOWLEDGMENTS a superhuman act of editorial valor and has been the most stalwart source of human support. The careful attention of Vincent Pecora greatly helped to improve the manuscript in its later stages. Howard Horowitz provided important blues. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Vincent Cheng and Stuart Culver. Yopie Prins and James Richardson deserve special thanks for inspiring and supporting Goblin Metrics, I will never be able to thank Graham Robb enough for Le Coupeur. Francesca Simkin was also extremely helpful with cobbling things together and tailoring the results. I am grateful that the staff at the BN were able to find ways to allow me to work on materials that the computer system felt should not occupy the same place at the same time. Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, and the editorial staff at Palgrave MacMillan have been generous and helpful in overseeing manuscript through to book. Benton and Phyllis Jamison provided love, a houseful of books, a seemingly endless education, and everything else I ever needed. Valerie Tamplin also helped make poetry a real presence in my early and later life. Craig Dworkin has been a wonderful partner and interlocutor about all things poetic, avant-garde, and, more recently, toddlery. Miles Justice Jamison Dworkin was very patient and understanding when the last stages of the manuscript s gestation and birth closely coincided with his own. My wonderful daughter, Juliana Nicole Penham, is a constant source of joy and inspiration, and I need to thank all the other Penhams too. Last but not least, I would like to thank Jim Provencher and Cary Plotkin, teachers who first taught me how to read and write about poetry.