"A Use in Measured Language": Poetry and Poetic Criticism after September 11

Abstract

At the 2001 Victorians Institute conference, which took place just weeks after the September 11 attacks, Margaret Homans had rewritten her keynote address leave plenty of open space. Instead of speaking about Queen Victoria, whose centenary prompted the conference's theme, Homans asked hard questions about the significance of Victorian scholarship in this new, changed world--and she wanted answers. Her keynote became a forum for the conferring valence of conference, a medium in which conferees could discuss our profession, our experiences with students, and our reactions and desires and doubts, in the wake of terrorism. As if academics were not already sufficiently insecure about the relevance of our work, the attacks stimulated a new urgency do something that Homans offered an opportunity consider where Victorian scholarship might fit within that agenda. We came no firm resolutions, and many of us have continued speculate about the value of our teaching and scholarship in the months since September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, it feels risky launch an essay on the future of Victorian poetic criticism from such serious ground. I am reminded of a review I read of Laurie Anderson's recent New York performance of Happiness, a piece in which Anderson told stories, some musing, some funny, some poignant, about life after the towers fell. The reviewer writes that Anderson opened with a Sept. 11, describing 'nightmares of falling, of birds on fire,' and returned the subject throughout the evening, but, her never let it the proceedings. (1) The key line here seems me be to her credit, for it suggests how easily the sense of overwhelm can dis-credit, or de-value, a performance. Such have become the stuff of a macabre mainstream marketing, of the sickeningly blunt nods of 2001 Superbowl spots and flag-waving advertisements. Now, anything more than a nod risks smacking of self-promotion or indulgence. But I ask some indulgence here, for I had the good fortune see that performance of Happiness, and I well remember my walk home across 66th street. I remember a trash can on the corner of Broadway, filled with bright blue and green and yellow flyers; an angry boy throwing dominoes in the air; and especially a tall, strangely triangular, truck into which five men were wheeling tall, strangely triangular cargo, folded and bundled like oversized rollaway cots (beds for giants, I thought). These are potentially insignificant details, but that night they became moments of startle and beauty that I might well have missed but for the mood of copious observation Anderson had set. It was then that 1 began thinking about this piece, about what I would like see in the future of Victorian poetic scholarship, about what we do that matters. Lately, I am most appreciative in all forms of art--in dance and music, in poetry and criticism--of that call consciousness that Anderson's work elicits, that jangling reminder celebrate the strange and beautiful. My favorite thinkers bring me into reflective thought about difficult questions. They surprise me, and make me consider differently the I know. They notice and call my attention surprises tucked away in familiar pockets; they startle me, make me contemplate loss, love, my own life, life in general, but always in ways that retain some sense of vibrancy, and of a bigger picture. If this is not terribly popular stuff in the world of literary criticism--if it smacks too much of humanism, or is too close the overwhelm of self-indulgence--it is, nonetheless, the stuff I am craving these days. Our Victorian poets offer up plenty of fodder for discovering wonder hidden in plain sight. When Hopkins indexes the glory of dappled things in Pied Beauty, he is grateful not simply for clouds and livestock and fish, but For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim. …