On Cultural Neoformalism, Spasmodic Poetry, and the Victorian Ballad

Abstract

Whither study of Victorian poetry? I'll put my money on odds of what Herbert Tucker calls neoformalism that ... Cultural Studies could yet put to use. (1) There are and have always been many more practices of formal analysis than much-maligned New Criticism. Through Cultural Studies, we can now imagine techniques of formal analysis that bring to literary texts direct opposite of New Critical decontextualization. And this seems exactly what some of most exciting criticism in our field is doing already. Matthew Campbell's Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, 1999), for example, reads metrical innovations of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, and Hardy as expressive of Victorian selfhood. Yopie Prins in Victorian Sappho (Princeton, 1999) yokes formal analysis to cultural phenomenon of Victorian poetess. (2) In these works, Tucker's included, close reading of very best sort takes literary as a subtle and often neglected vehicle for broader cultural forces. Such a coupling of methodologies has dual benefit of enlivening formal approaches to and grounding work in cultural studies more firmly in textual evidence. It also opens for new discussion a host of Victorian poetic oddities that critics have long avoided. Take as an example brouhaha inspired by so-called Spasmodic school of poetics. Critics of 1850s were most disturbed by works of Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, and Philip James Bailey--the most prominent of Spasmodics--precisely many Victorians believed embodies spirit of its age. In an essay attacking Spasmodics, Coventry Patmore warns that poetry is coloured by age in which it is produced, and takes its tints from various influences that surround it, quickening its life, fostering its strength, or stunting its growth. (3) Reflecting its time, perhaps, Spasmodic was noted for its violent meters, its egoistic disregard for community, and, according to Patmore, its remote and involved thinking, abrupt and jerking mental movements (p. 130). Patmore sums up his distaste in an Edinburgh Review essay wherein he argues that chief characteristics of Spasmodic verse are violence and incongruity, ... tawdriness, bombast, and imbecility. (4) A passage from Alexander Smith's A Life-Drama (1852), chosen almost at random, indicates that such criticism is not entirely without reason: by constant staring on his ills, They grew worse-featured; till, in his great rage, His spirit, like a roused sea, white with wrath, Struck at stars. fast! Hold fast! my brain! Had I a curse to kill with, by yon Heaven! I'd feast worms to-night. (5) More brilliant yet, Sydney Dobell's Balder (1854) features imagery rarely encountered--to say least--in nineteenth-century print: The hot and hideous torrent of his dung / Roared down explosive. (6) If mirrors world in which it is composed, then Spasmodic verse provides a suggestive picture indeed of Victorian England. And style was not limited to minor poets; even poet laureate was to publish a poem--Maud (1855)--in Spasmodic mode, with language comparable to the rasping of a blacksmith's file. (7) According to Edmund Gosse, writing with hindsight in 1877, it was Spasmodics' lack of and style--blustering blank verse--that led to their imminent (and, to Gosse, welcome) demise: the whole school passed into thin air. (8) Gosse announces with pleasure that poets who emerged after Spasmodic debacle, notably Swinburne, Morris, and D. G. Rossetti, brought new life to structural technique: variety and richness of rhyme, elasticity of verse, and strength of form (p. 55). But why should one care that a sonnet has fourteen lines with four rhymes, in decasyllabic iambics, duly arranged? Echoing Matthew Arnold, Gosse's response makes perfectly clear social and political implications of poetic form: because it has been proved in history of literature that law is better than anarchy (p. …