Introduction: Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Abstract

Introduction:Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination Jill R. Ehnenn (bio) and Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) What might it mean to "see" poetry of the nineteenth century? Certainly, it might mean an act of generic visibility: reorienting conceptions of the Victorian age as equivalent to the rise of the novel to reconsider the centrality of poetry (an act of scholarly recovery that has been in process for at least the past decade). It might also gesture toward the visual possibilities of poetic language—the transportive effects of the imagination—and the interrelation of media, sensory modes (words, ideas, tastes, sounds, sights, spectacles), and the embodied experience that Victorian poetry is uniquely primed to explore. And, of course, it also conjures up the optical technologies that allowed for mechanical "seeing"—photographic and engraved images, the magic lantern, kaleidoscope, stereoscope, and others—alongside the so-called Golden Age of illustration, a moment in which literature—and particularly poetry and periodicals—is richly illustrated to join word and image. What might such thinking about the visual vis-à-vis Victorian poetry bring to the discipline of Victorian studies—indeed, English studies in general—especially now? Since the 1990s, the field of Victorian studies has emphasized the impact of visual culture on historical and literary contexts. As Kate Flint asserts in her The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), the visual is a dominant mode of the Victorian period. Jonathan Crary questioned subjectivity by foregrounding the role of the nineteenth-century observer in his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990). By tracing optical devices as "sites of both knowledge and power that operate directly on the body of the individual," Crary used optical experience and visual culture to reconsider what we mean by realism in the nineteenth century.1 Jonathan Potter furthers Crary's argument, showcasing the continual negotiation of Victorian subjectivities by focusing on the mediation of perceptual experience in his Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2018). Yet, these conversations about individual subjectivities and the intersections between the visual and verbal environs have largely explored genres other than poetry. This special issue, therefore, centers on the affordances of poetry as a [End Page 429] site of visual imagination. How might looking at the intersections of the Victorian visual imagination and the field of nineteenth-century poetry provide new insights into continued conversations surrounding both poetics and visual culture? What, then, might it mean to "look" differently at Victorian poetry? In the essays that follow, the contributors offer unique methodologies, case studies, and discussions about how new ways of looking provoke affective representations of others and one's own identity. But perhaps more broadly, these new considerations of poetry and the visual imagination offer disruptions to the so-called natural or normal order. When thinking specifically of the possibilities of Victorian poetry, Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow both point to the genre's experimental and social nature.2 This experimentalism is extended with what Margaret Stetz terms "genre crossing" in her argument of genre at the fin de siècle, that in the 1890s, "everyone—reviewers, bookbuyers, other publishers, and authors—[were encouraged] to think beyond the law of genre and to experiment with writing that crossed boundaries."3 Even earlier, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, famously argued for a new poetic form when writing Aurora Leigh: not only an amalgamation of verse forms but "one that would adapt established styles to contemporary needs."4 Victorian poetry, therefore, is marked by its experimental nature and its publicly oriented focus on "contemporary needs." Indeed, one might argue that this public focus is further solidified with poetry's natural integration with visual culture and its situation within lived experience and sociality. Looking inward and outward, prompted by new modalities (and new combinations) in the visual and written arts, the Victorians, it seems, were natural disrupters. And what better time to be reconsidering the possibilities of disruption than in 2022, following a pandemic, an ongoing climate crisis, and the global rise of authoritarianism leading to the January 6 uprising, its aftermath, and the repeal of Roe v. Wade? In the Oxford English Dictionary, "disrupt," as a verb, is defined...