General Materials

Abstract

Guide to the Year's WorkGeneral Materials Albert D. Pionke (bio) This year's survey of general materials features chapters from four books. These three edited collections and one monograph position Victorian poets and poetry with respect to the particular writerly legacies of Byron and Keats and the broader scientific and artistic developments in medicine and ballet, respectively. Individual Victorian-era poets discussed, whether concisely or extensively, in these diverse contexts include Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letitia Elizabeth Landen, Edward Lear, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. Initiated from the weekend symposium "Byron among the Poets," held at All Soul's College, Oxford, in January, 2018, Clare Bucknell and Matthew Ward's edited collection Byron among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021) is "preoccupied both with Byronic allusion and the question of poetic influence more broadly, as it relates to Byron's reworking of his predecessors and to the way Byronic wording, forms and ideas surface and resurface in the work of later writers" (p. 8). Readers of Victorian Poetry may be especially interested in chapters 14 through 17 from the book's third chronologically arranged section, "Afterlives," which "looks ahead to the presence of Byronic forms, motifs, manners and characters in post-Romantic poetry" (p. 12). Thus, in "In-Between Byrons: Byronic Legacies in Women's Poetry of the Late Romantic to Mid-Victorian Era," Sarah Wootton positions Letitia Elizabeth Landon as "a pivotal figure in the dissemination of Byron and Byronic influence from the mid-1820s to the 1840s" (p. 235). Focusing sequentially on "Lorenzo's History" (1824), "Lines Suggested on Visiting Newstead Abbey" (1839), "The Portrait of Lord Byron, at Newstead Abbey" (1840), and "Stanzas. Written Beneath the Portrait of Lord Byron, Painted by Mr West" (1827), Wootton tracks Landon's ambivalent response to Byron's and her own "iconic status . . . while also expressing concerns about the longevity of his verse and use, or misuse, of his poetic skill" (p. 236). Next, Jane Stabler's "Byron and Browning: Something and Nothing" examines "moments [End Page 345] when Robert Browning appears to fall into or in with Byron's cadences, particularly their shared use of the word 'something' and their attention to moments when characters say nothing" (p. 252). Less definite than more straightforwardly verifiable allusions, these "subtler echoings," also referred to as "analogues," are scattered widely across Browning's poetic corpus (pp. 252, 262). Ward's essay, "Arnold's Ambivalence and Byron's Force and Fire," follows. For Ward, "Arnold's writing to and through Byron suggests that he retained a wish for Romantic influence more than he felt an anxiety of influence," especially when faced with the loss of "collective feeling" and "decline of poetry" in his own age (pp. 272, 272, 275). Finally, Richard Cronin rounds out the Victorian portion of "Afterlives" by reexamining Swinburne's ambivalent relationship to Byron. In "A. C. Swinburne and Byron's Bad Ear," Cronin traces Swinburne's shift from "principal restorer" of his predecessor's reputation to "hardened" critic of Byron's "metrical deficiencies" (pp. 287, 289). The irony, Cronin observes, is that even in the 1880s, "when attacking Byron most savagely, Swinburne's tendency is to echo him" (p. 293). Echoes of Victorian poetry also resound in individual chapters from two additional edited collections. Daniel Brown's "Physics and Metaphysics: Poetry and the Unsteady Ascent of Professional Medicine" serves as the fifth chapter of Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham's Literature and Medicine: The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021). Within the period framed by Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine and Ronald Ross's demonstration of the life cycle of the malarial parasite in mosquitos (1796–1897), Brown reconstructs the increasingly strained relationship between medicine and poetry in the nineteenth century. Through succinct close readings of poems by George Crabb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, George Gordon, Lord Byron, John Keats, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Edward Lear, and a host of lesser-known poets and poet-physicians, Brown shows how, "[b]uilding upon the legacies of...