Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics.

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. In recent years, comprehensive overviews of literary periods, likeperiodization Periodization is the attempt to categorize or divide time into discrete named blocks. The result is a descriptive abstraction that provides a useful handle on periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. itself, have fallen out of fashion. Isobel Armstrongcharacterizes her book as "a series of essays rather than acontinuous history" and warns us that "the allocation of spaceto different poets is deliberately uneven" (8). Yet the broad scaleof the work and its equally large claims have general application, asher title suggests. Challenging, ambitious, often convincing, alwaysthought-provoking, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politicsclearly is a major contribution to our understanding of both Victorianpoets in their culture and their relevance to ours.Armstrong directs her argument squarely at the contemporary reader,who is probably postmodern but certainly post modern: that is, post themodernists' repression of the Victorians, who - already themselvespost-revolutionary, post-teleological, post-industrial, and post-Kantian- address many of the same issues that were to preoccupy pre��oc��cu��py?tr.v. pre��oc��cu��pied, pre��oc��cu��py��ing, pre��oc��cu��pies1. To occupy completely the mind or attention of; engross. See Synonyms at monopolize.2. twentieth-century artists while resisting the modernist view of art asself-reflexive and self-referential. The formidable task Armstrong setsher history is "to restore the questions of politics, not leastsexual politics, and the epistemology and language which belong toit" (7); moreover, she must find a way of discussing these workswithout (our) modernist critical vocabulary that privileges ambiguityand epiphanic concentration, which she has called elsewhere "therhetoric of brevity" ("Ring and the Book" 179). To aremarkable extent, she succeeds. On the one hand, careful (albeit brief)attention is paid to the material circumstances in which the writersworked, including the worsening social conditions of the 1840s, thefinancial speculations of the 1860s, and especially the Crimean War. Onthe other hand, Armstrong's primary emphasis - on the politics (aswell as the economics) of language and on the ways in which apoem's very structure forces questions of agency and interpretation- reinscribes a more subtle sense of politics.The interpretive stance here is complex, persuasive, and for the mostpart refreshingly free of supererogatory su��per��e��rog��a��to��ry? also su��per��e��rog��a��tiveadj.1. Performed or observed beyond the required or expected degree.2. theoretical gestures. Informedbut not dominated by theory, Armstrong acknowledges particularly theimpressive recent work of Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionistcritics. But she also finds characteristic flaws: too-ready ascriptionsof intentionality intentionalityProperty of being directed toward an object. Intentionality is exhibited in various mental phenomena. Thus, if a person experiences an emotion toward an object, he has an intentional attitude toward it. in the first two, a tendency to rest on ludic lu��dic?adj.Of or relating to play or playfulness: "Fiction . . . now makes [language] contradictions in the last. While she substitutes a "generousunderstanding of the text as struggle" (10) for resolution orsterile play, "deconstruction" remains the privileged term, asis apparent from the dozens of times that word appears in some form.This is entirely appropriate, given the key status in this work of the"double poem," the poem that offers simultaneously anexpressive and an analytical reading.Yet Armstrong's claim that the complexity of Victorian poetryrequires a criticism derived from twentieth-century philosophy is notborne out by her practice. Indeed, she calls her approach "a newHegelian reading" (15), drawing directly on deconstruction'ssource and implicitly referring back to the argument she offered in herlast book, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Shealso suggests in several places that high (biblical) criticism providesa model for analysis of the text as a process of "construction andreconstruction," a recurring phrase that implies a positivealternative to much deconstructive practice. And perhaps mostimportantly, she thoroughly grounds her politicization of language inthe writings of nineteenth-century theorists and critics.Here and throughout, doubleness is not only a theme but a structuralelement: the early works of Tennyson and Browning, whose politics areseen to "initiate the founding rhetoric of Victorian poetry and itsproblems, conservative and radical" (135), are read against twodifferent intellectual formations, the subversive conservativeaesthetics of Arthur Hallam (and the Cambridge Apostles) and theUtilitarian poetics of William Johnson Fox William Johnson Fox (1786-1864) was a religious and political orator, born near Southwold, Suffolk.The ambition of Fox was to become a great political orator and debater, in which at last he succeeded. (editor of the MonthlyRepository, whose views he represents). Armstrong views these groups notas polarized but as in dialogue on issues of literature and ideology,the construction of culture, epistemology, language, class, race, andgender, and she traces how the poets reflect and critique them.Tennyson's self-reflective poetry of sensation and Browning'sattempt to create a self-interrogating democratic work both issue indifferent kinds of double poems. In the course of this argument,compelling fresh readings are offered that considerably complicate thereceived views of such familiar poems as "The Lady ofShalott," which here becomes an exploration of the problems ofrepresentation and the conditions of myth. The extensive discussion notonly of Browning's 1836 monologues but also of Pauline shouldrekindle re��kin��dle?tr.v. re��kin��dled, re��kin��dling, re��kin��dles1. To relight (a fire).2. To revive or renew: rekindled an old interest in the sciences. - or more likely kindle A portable e-book device from Amazon.com that provides wireless connectivity to Amazon for e-book downloads as well as Wikipedia and search engines. Using Sprint's EV-DO cellphone network, dubbed WhisperNet, wireless access is free. It also includes a built-in dictionary. - readers' interest in that poemand its complex if unsuccessful project.Naturally, Browning and Tennyson receive considerable attention inVictorian Poetry, not only for these foundational works but for their"new experiments" of the 1850s. Another predictablejuxtaposition is Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough: each, Armstrongsuggests, has the "sense that the other is a repressed form ofhimself" (176) as their struggles with classicism classicism,a term that, when applied generally, means clearness, elegance, symmetry, and repose produced by attention to traditional forms. It is sometimes synonymous with excellence or artistic quality of high distinction. and a commonsense of alienated individualism take very different forms. Hertreatment of The Bothie Both´ien. 1. Same as Bothy. of Tober-Na-Vuolich is particularly strong, asis her characterization of it as probably the most openly politicallycommitted of all Victorian poems. In a less expected pairing, ThomasCooper's section on Empedocles in his Purgatory of Suicides (1845)is seen as a repressed element in Arnold's Empedocles, usefullyreminding us that Arnoldian intellectual despair tends to conceal theera's collective political despair.Armstrong's chapter on William Morris, who like Arnold andClough was concerned with "individualism under pressure,"contains an excellent discussion of The Defence of Guenevere. She hereargues strongly for the importance of Ruskin's Grotesque (asarticulated in The Stones of Venice) in understanding not only Morrisbut nineteenth-century poetry more generally, pointing out that histheory made possible art as a form of resistance and of analysis andthus both reinforced Browning's sense of the radical possibilitiesof the dramatic form and provided a framework for later writers asdifferent as Gerard Manley Hopkins Noun 1. Gerard Manley Hopkins - English poet (1844-1889)Hopkins , George Meredith, and James Thomson.In considering the poets of the 1860s and 1870s, Armstrong resiststhe term "Pre-Raphaelite," a label that obscures importantdifferences and excludes other poets with common concerns, particularlyabout different paradigms of language. Here, too, she offers twotheorists of language, H. L. Mansel and Max Muller, whose views, indialogue with one another, informed the work of these poets. Thisproduces probably her most surprising juxtaposition: Swinburne and"his uncanny twin or perverse double," Hopkins (403), bothmanifesting different forms of linguistic hysteria as each reacts to aperceived breakdown in language. There are also very intelligentdiscussions of Meredith (the anti-poem of Modern Love, Armstrongsuggests, is Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House), Thomson, and apostscript persuasively characterizing Thomas Hardy's Dynasts asboth a great double poem and a modernist experiment.The book includes a long and fascinating chapter on women poets,somewhat uneasily positioned. Though not entirely comfortable with theseparate status of a woman's tradition, Armstrong finds thistreatment appropriate because of the poets' self-definition as theywork with and against literary and social convention. There is an odddefensiveness in her insistence that the simpler the surface, the morelikely it is that a critical double poem is at work. If we credit herclaim, made almost casually, that women poets "'invented'the dramatic monologue" (326), the typical form of the double poem,then surely they should be more thoroughly integrated into the largerargument of the book. Nevertheless, Armstrong's approach hasconsiderable rewards. As with the male poets, she focuses on methodrather than overt polemic, and beginning with dual precursors, LetitiaLandon and Felicia Hemans, suggests common strategies for negotiatingconventions and restraints (her reading of "Casabianca"reveals the strong critique beneath this most derided ofnineteenth-century poems). Emphasizing the connection of femininepoetics and expressive theory - a link encapsulated in RobertBrowning's famous praise of Elizabeth Barrett, "You speak out,you, - I only make men & women speak" (1: 7) - serves Armstrongparticularly well in analyses of Dora Greenwell, Jean Ingelow, andespecially Christina Rossetti, most notably a striking reading of GoblinMarket in terms of the interdependence of expression and repression. Thechapter also recuperates an impressive number of writers commonly unreador misread.There are some general weaknesses. A certain degree of allusiveness al��lu��sive?adj.Containing or characterized by indirect references: an allusive speech.al��lu is inevitable given the enormity of the material and the limitations ofspace, and the coverage is designedly designedlyAdverbby intentionAdv. 1. designedly - with intention; in an intentional manner; "he used that word intentionally"; "I did this by choice" uneven: still, it is dishearteningto find The Princess cited at the end of a chapter as a surprise inTennyson's corpus - and never mentioned again. More seriously,sketchy treatment of works that are discussed sometimes leave thereader, however intrigued, unconvinced. Here, as in the (understandable)scarcity of reference to secondary criticism, Armstrong requires a depthof familiarity that few readers are likely to possess across the breadthof her argument. And though her inclusion of "minor" writersis entirely praiseworthy praise��wor��thy?adj. praise��wor��thi��er, praise��wor��thi��estMeriting praise; highly commendable.praise , the effort leads to some rather uneasytransitions and the occasional feeling that these poets have beenshoehorned into a particular chapter. The text is also unfortunatelymarred by a large number of proofreading Proofreading traditionally means reading a proof copy of a text in order to detect and correct any errors. Modern proofreading often requires reading copy at earlier stages as well. errors, one of which("Poetry is 'heard,' eloquence is'overheard'" [137]) precisely reverses the crucialdistinction being made.Though Armstrong cogently objects to methods of criticism that denypoems their specificity, turning them into repetitions of the samenarrative, it might appear that her use of the double poem threatens todo the same. But she meticulously and - to use one of her own criticalterms - fiercely contextualizes the poems. The simple expedient ofconsidering not just a poet's prose writings but the poemspublished in a volume as a totality is extremely effective (particularlyfor Meredith and Swinburne). Also noteworthy is her frequent recourse toother poetry being written at the time, a strategy that makes the bookan extraordinary resource for serious consideration of Ebenezer Elliott,R. H. Home, Anne Adelaide Proctor, Elijah Ridings, and many others. AndArmstrong's deft, sensitive readings of better-known poets andpoems make Victorian Poetry essential for coming to terms with the worksthat have long defined this period.WORKS CITEDArmstrong, Isobel. Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-CenturyPoetry. Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1982.-----. "The Ring and the Book: The Uses of Prolixity PROLIXITY. The unnecessary and superfluous statement of facts in pleading or in evidence. This will be rejected as impertinent. 7 Price, 278, n. ." TheMajor Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations. Ed. Armstrong. London:Routledge, 1969. 177-97.Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert, and Elizabeth Barrett(1812–1889) (1806–1861) 19th-century love one of most celebrated of literary romances. [Br. Lit.: Benét, 139]See : Lovers, Famous . The Letters of RobertBrowning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846. 2 vols. Ed. ElvanKintner. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969.