JANET GEZARI. Last Things: The Poems of Emily Bronte.

Abstract

Virginia Woolf conjectured in 1916 that Emily Brontë's poems might ultimately outlast her novel. But that has not yet happened; nearly a century after Woolf's observation, Brontë's poetry is still studied largely for the light it throws on Wuthering Heights. In Last Things, Janet Gezari, who edited Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems for Penguin in 1992, sets out once more to remedy the continued neglect of this body of work. Gezari's stated goal is to offer ‘new ways to read Brontë's poems and new reasons for wanting to read them’ (p. 1), but by ‘new’ Gezari does not mean au courant. Instead, she provides the most sensitive, sympathetic, discriminating account of the work to date, and in the process draws out Brontë's very real merit as a lyric poet whose work repays close study. The continued critical neglect of Emily Brontë as a poet is striking, given that there has been a surge of work on Victorian women poets since the 1990s. Gezari points out that Brontë's poems are excluded even from a recent anthology of Victorian women poets, and that feminist critics have had relatively little to say about them. She rejects the paradigm of the woman poet struggling with a male muse through which Margaret Homans and Irene Tayler have read Brontë's poetry. Gezari instead reads the poems very closely, paying attention to their handling of meter, rhyme and other elements of prosody. She teases out the effects of versification on Brontë's meaning with an ear finely attuned to the music of Brontë's verse. Additionally, she considers individual poems in relation to the others and to the canon of lyric poetry and poetics from the Romantics to such modernist poets as Hardy and Geoffrey Hill, with glances across the Atlantic to Dickinson and Poe. In other words, she treats Brontë as a poet, first and foremost, without regard to gender or other questions of identity or ideology, and with only enough attention to other discursive contexts to illuminate the poems on which she focuses.