Poets, Poems, Poetics
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Cunningham_cover.indd 1 5/26/2011 6:38:25 PM CCunningham_ffirs.inddunningham_ffirs.indd iiii 55/16/2011/16/2011 11:13:40:13:40 PPMM Victorian Poetry Now CCunningham_ffirs.inddunningham_ffirs.indd i 55/16/2011/16/2011 11:13:39:13:39 PPMM CCunningham_ffirs.inddunningham_ffirs.indd iiii 55/16/2011/16/2011 11:13:40:13:40 PPMM Victorian Poetry Now Poets, Poems, Poetics Valentine Cunningham A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication CCunningham_ffirs.inddunningham_ffirs.indd iiiiii 55/16/2011/16/2011 11:13:40:13:40 PPMM This edition fi rst published 2011 © 2011 Valentine Cunningham Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientifi c, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Offi ce John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offi ces 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offi ces, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Valentine Cunningham to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. 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If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cunningham, Valentine. Victorian poetry now : poets, poems, poetics / Valentine Cunningham. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-20826-6 (hardback) 1. English poetry–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Poetics–History–19th century. 3. Poetry–Authorship–History–19th century. 4. Literature and society–Great Britain– History–19th century. I. Title. PR591.C86 2011 821′.809–dc22 2010049294 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs [9781444340419]; Wiley Online Library [9781444340440]; ePub [9781444340426] Set in 10/12 pt Sabon by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India 1 2011 CCunningham_ffirs.inddunningham_ffirs.indd iivv 55/16/2011/16/2011 11:13:40:13:40 PPMM Contents Preface vi Part I: So Far as The Words Are Concerned 1 1 Words, Words, Words and More Words 3 2 Rhyming/Repeating 55 3 Making Noise/Noising Truths 73 4 These Rhyming/Repeating Games Are Serious 108 Part II: Contents and Discontents of The Forms 149 5 Down-Sizing 151 6 Selving 189 7 Fleshly Feelings 259 8 Mourning and Melancholia 323 9 Modernizing The Subject 409 10 Victorian Modernismus 463 Index 504 CCunningham_ftoc.inddunningham_ftoc.indd v 55/11/2011/11/2011 111:36:151:36:15 PPMM Preface This critical-historical account of Victorian poetry attempts to give some sense – to make some sense – of the productions of the most aweingly pro- ductive period of poetry there’s ever been, in any language. Just how many ‘Victorian’ poets and poems there were really came home to me in compil- ing my Blackwells collection The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2000), with its 158 named poets (and a ghostly band of not-all- that-bad poets excluded for reasons only of space). Most of the discussion in this book has grown out of lectures and classes at Oxford and elsewhere seeking to arm undergraduates and graduates – and still more grown-up readers too – with some map through this densely matted overgrowth and undergrowth. How to see the wood for the trees, and the trees for the wood. To make out the figures in this very large carpet. To see, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, the poetic object ‘as in itself it really is’ – though reckoning the poetic object, the text, not as some neatly bounded, autotelic, done and dusted, perfectly finished thing (did Arnold ever really think that?), but as it indeed is, a messy, fluid scene or drama of language, its ‘final’ words never unconscious of their precedent try-outs (many of them now handily, and always eye-openingly, available in major editions), and in many cases bear- ing the traces of its as it were evolutionary ancestors in earlier poems (what we now think of as its intertextual forebears); its words slippery to grip, given as they are more to connotation than denotation, to multivalence rather than singleness of mind; its grammar happily fuzzy (as modern gram- marians have it); its referentiality so difficult to pin down because this writ- ing is so utterly receptive to the world of things outside it. These texts are deictic alright, but pointing all over the place. This textuality is so porous: all at once also intertextual and contextual. Every genre, said Derrida on a wise occasion, overflows all boundaries assigned to it. And so it is with every item in consideration by my title: poem, poetics, poet even, certainly poetry, and of course Victorian. CCunningham_fpref.inddunningham_fpref.indd vvii 55/11/2011/11/2011 111:36:251:36:25 PPMM Preface vii They’re all of them hazy and blurry as would-be knowable ‘objects’; though in practice we do have to keep talking about them as such: Victorian, poetry, poet, poem, poetics. A multi-pronged complexity then. My prime critical business is with ‘poems’, those complex utterances. Poems in their great Victorian multiplic- ity. High canonical ones, of course, but backed of necessity by reference to the great mass of second-division and also obviously minor ones. As well as merely citing lots, I do keep dwelling at some length on individual poems – there’s much close reading here – singletons which have to stand (as is the inevitable way of criticism) synecdochically, and I hope convincingly, for the always greater numbers of their authors’ production, and the literary pro- duction of their era, the very very large Victorian poetic oeuvre. My sub-title puts ‘poets’ first, because I’m not afraid of the fact that poems are produced by poets, actual men and women, living in the real world, who are the actual thinking, feeling, writing channels for all the contents and discontents which poems evince. It’s not writing that writes – to reverse Roland Barthes’s noto- rious formula – but writers. So, no Death of the Author here, but rather constant biographical name-checking and a constant eye out for what have been called ‘biographemes’, the textualizing of authorial concerns. Poets, then; and my mission is to show how poets, and so their poems, come mari- naded in politics and economics, the wars of contemporary ideas, and how they’re utterly conscious of their times. And poets, and so their poems, also, in the main, highly self-conscious poetically, aesthetically. These writers are nothing if not readers, who keep positioning themselves and their work in relation to other writers and writings, and other aesthetic practices like painting, practising intertextuality and intermediality (as we say nowadays). Hence the constant stress in my analyses on the ‘poetics’ of my title – on the contemporary theorizing of poetry and the poetic; on the constant discus- sion within poems about poeticity and aesthetic function (metatextuality: poems about poems; poems self-reflecting by proxy in ekphrastic engage- ments with surrogate made-objects such as paintings); my constant hearken- ing to what’s done with the Bible and Shakespeare and Dante and the Classics (especially the Roman); and my interest in the debate for and against medievalism and classicism. I persistently position my poets and their poems around large nodes of contemporary theoretical/critical discussion – about rhyme, onomatopeia, Ruskinian ‘pathetic fallacy’, Arnoldian ‘modernity’, the so-called ‘Fleshly School’, Mrs Browning’s ‘sort of novel-poem’, and so on – because that’s what contemporary poets and their poems and their readers did. Much of what reading the poetic objects as in themselves they really are must take in is, of course, given: the particular words on the page (and/or in the footnotes of good editions), and so words and word-issues occupy prime place in my critical narratives; as also the available, legible, statements from CCunningham_fpref.inddunningham_fpref.indd vviiii 55/11/2011/11/2011 111:36:251:36:25 PPMM viii Preface the poets about what they think and mean and intend; and the poetic con- cerns and topics of my authors and of their times; and the contemporary Victorian critical agenda which foreground the current questions of form, rhetoric, content, style. But reading in the ‘Now’ of my title – Victorian Poetry Now – is always contingent on the modern reader’s contemporary reading agenda.