Budgets and Brownings: The Function of Poetry at the Present Time

Abstract

There is a crisis in poetry. There is a crisis in Victorian poetry. At least according to much been said of late about future of verse. PMLA recently sought submissions for a special issue on poetry, asking, has time come to revisit relevance of and pleasures of poetic text in this changed interpretive universe? and questioning the possibilities of aesthetic analysis after deconstruction. A recent call for papers for a conference on future of Victorian notes gloomy prognostications about academic future of in general and 'difficult' in particular. No other literary form I know of seems to generate this apocalyptic rhetoric, doubtless because poetry, perhaps unlike prose, loses much if it loses its aesthetic capital. Poetry's relevance and survival are ongoing concerns, as many Victorians themselves thought fate of Western civilization to turn in large measure upon question of verse. While Matthew Arnold prescribed sweetness and light of culture as tonic for a society sick with philistine utility, Lord Macaulay provocatively declared in his essay on Milton, we think that, as civilization advances, almost necessarily declines. If survived utilitarianism and industrialism, can it survive in wake of theory or post-theory? More important, can it weather downsizing, utilitarian university and a student population unequipped to encounter poetry in general and 'difficult' in particular? I would not be writing this article, nor would you be reading it, if most of us were not prepared to answer yes. To convince others to answer in affirmative, I hope to profile some trends in study of Victorian verse and to sketch out new scholarly dimensions grounded in classroom, where future of Victorian poetry, like of rest of liberal arts, lies. I shall keep in background of this academic profile following practical concerns: survival of Victorian classes amid shrinking budgets and enrollments; ongoing crisis in job market; and enduring problems of reading, difficulty, and rigor in our ever-changing classrooms. Three broad areas of scholarship address these concerns--the cultural status of poetry, its forms and genres, and its academic history. As Victorians placed value of at center of culture, so I think best work today examines Victorian poetry's cultural value. I am encouraged by scholarship both investigates and challenges nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns of canon formation, (1) as Victorian is, in words of Kathy Alexis Psomiades, that area of literary endeavor upon whose devaluation profession of literary criticism was founded. (2) The work of recovery and analysis of dominant canonical values in scholarship on Victorian women's continue. Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow, and Cath Sharrock's anthology, Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, is exemplary in its generous selections of both canonical and noncanonical women's poetry, including sentimental lyrics and evangelical hymns. (3) This endeavor extends to a large number of journal issues, books, and collections of essays on women's verse. (4) Following from groundwork laid down by James Eli Adams and others in study of Victorian masculinities, much recent work also taken a self-consciously masculinist approach, as does Clinton Machann's essay on Lord Tennyson's Idylls. (5) The study of Victorian genre and form seems never quite to exhaust itself, partially because Victorians themselves were such innovators of genre. I am interested in a kind of scholarship examines poetic form as both reflective and constitutive of outside world. Yopie Prins studies lyric and fragment, arguing Sappho, and therefore lesbian desire, are its origin (pp. 3-5); Prins demonstrates elsewhere Victorian explosion of prosody books reflects death of voice and emergence of a graphic materialization of through continuity of metrical marks. …