Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language by Donald S. Hair

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language by Donald S. Hair Clara Dawson (bio) Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language by Donald S. Hair; pp. 312. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 2015. $70.00 cloth. As donald Hair writes in the conclusion to Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Language, "the EBB I present in this book is not the usual EBB" (280), and indeed, his study of Barrett Browning's poetics gives one of the most clear-sighted explications of her exceptional and experimental poetry. Hair's book also evinces how a full scholarly edition of a poet's work can extend the scope of criticism: the publication in 2010 of The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Pickering and Chatto) has made it much easier for critics to explore the full range of her works (and also to assume that this range is accessible to their readers). Hair makes excellent use of this advantage, covering her career from its inception in An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems (1826) to its culmination in Last Poems (1862), and includes various unpublished pieces. The introduction gives a useful précis of the critical field and particularly of the growth in scholarly interest in Victorian prosody. Taking his title from one of Robert Browning's courtship letters, Hair follows this prosodic interest in the direction of music, which he defines as "music in its technical sense, that is, as units of equal time (bars), each beginning with a strong beat" (3). He argues that Barrett Browning resists the eighteenth-century emphasis on conventional scansion and syllable counting, developing instead a poetical [End Page 191] system that consists of units of equal time, including pauses, caesuras, and extra syllables rather than feet. Hair's book builds on the critical work done by Jason Rudy, Joseph Phelan, and Meredith Martin on Victorian prosody, but particularly on the case made by these critics that prosody is not a passive reflection of themes. Instead, prosody is seminal in the invention of new ways to sound political as well as theological ideas and debates. Each of the readings in Hair's book is interwoven with material from contemporary discussions of poetics and from Barrett Browning's published reviews and letters, revealing her debates with correspondents such as Uvedale Price, Richard Hengist Horne, and, of course, Robert Browning. This thorough research is rewarding in that it exhibits Barrett Browning's experiments as deeply thought-through and self-conscious processes. For instance, chapter 4's focus on Barrett Browning's delineation of English literary history in the Athenaeum and her translation of Chaucer in the 1840s enables Hair to elucidate further the development of her poetics toward quantity rather than accent. While each section of Hair's book offers an illuminating reading, most valuable are the chapters on works that have received relatively little criticism, such as the early poetry and An Essay on Mind. In chapter 1, Hair lays the groundwork for his theory of Barrett Browning's musical poetics by giving an account of her engagement with philosophers of mind and language, particularly Locke and Bacon, in An Essay on Mind. He establishes the philosophical grounding of her poetics and the relations they create between words and ideas, matter and mind, demonstrating that "the main point of her definition of poetry is that it is a making and not an imitating" (37). In chapter 2, Hair explores the context of key words such as "harmony" (18) and "cadence" (19) within the history of prosodic debates about quantity and duration in English and classical verse and examines their manifestation in Barrett Browning's early poetry. These two chapters set up one of the central arguments of the book: that Barrett Browning's poetics propose an idea of world harmony wherein music links the earthly and spiritual spheres and, if enabled through poetry, brings insight and truth to readers. Readings of "The Seraphim" and "Drama of Exile" show how EBB's religious beliefs intertwined with her poetics; in what Hair calls a "myth of musical prosody" (105), she recreates the cadences and resonances of divine language using the fallen language of...