American Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic

Abstract

IN A SPEECH GIVEN AT A FORMAL DINNER IN 1868 FOR SAMUEL BREESE MORSE (THE American portrait painter who invented telegraph), William Cullen Bryant began by speaking behalf of press as a New York City newspaper editor and ended by giving a bravura performance of transatlantic imaginary he had become famous for as a poet. My imagination goes down to chambers of middle sea, Bryant mused, to those vast depths where repose on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on bottom of dim blue gulfs strewn with bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, among fountains of great deep, abode of perpetual silence, never visited by human and beyond sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, of human borne by which obeys bidding of man. That slender thrills with hopes and fears of nations; it to every that can be awakened by any event affecting welfare of human race. (1) As a member of press, Bryant stressed telegraph's speed of transmission; as a poet, Bryant transfigured cable into a lyric impulse, a mystic wire that vibrates to every emotion on both sides of Atlantic, a fantasy of living human presence where there is none, currents of human thought circulating around detritus of culture and nature alike. This poetic notion is real communicator: an idea of expression much more capacious than expression itself, however transmitted; not news itself but vibrating cords that will unite nations, that will affectively perform the welfare of human race that (alas) over-water politics may have failed to sustain. (2) As essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, Bryant's fantastic elaboration of this transatlantic poetic was symptomatic of what we now call Poetry--a phrase coined in New York rather than in London, and one which now finds itself strung not only between continents, but between notions of that themselves seem whimsical responses to technology of modernity: colorful, humanistic, and (already, in 1868) somewhat pathetically out of date. In recent issues of this journal both parts of journal's title have come up for discussion: What was or is it to be Victorian? What does and does not count as Poetry? Last year, in Whether Victorian Poetry: A Genre and its Period, Joseph Bristow responded to Linda K. Hughes's introduction to a previous issue on future of Victorian poetry studies (Whither Victorian Poetry?) by suggesting that if poetic genres produced in period known as 'Victorian' have a future, then their future resides in a present moment that is increasingly motivated by belief that forecast for this area of study remains exceptionally promising because field itself belonged to a technological age whose fascination with material progress nonetheless anticipated our own interest in virtual technologies. (3) For Bristow, as for Bryant, question of technology is really question of transmission: how do old poetic genres travel across an ocean and a century to become poetry (or live-feed poetry), how is our current sense of what that poetry was determined by our current sense of what poetry is, and what connects those senses to one another? For contemporary scholars of Victorian poetry, as for Bryant, idea of does a lot of cultural work: it transcends particular genres (ballads, say, or elegies or odes), and it even represents technological progress, electric pulse that might connect literature and literary study, one century to another and now to another. …