Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address, by Justin Sider

Abstract

Reviewed by: Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address by Justin Sider Melissa Valiska Gregory (bio) Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address, by Justin Sider; pp. xiv + 263. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2018, $45.00. When U. S. presidents leave office, convention dictates that the outgoing president leaves on the desk of the Oval Office a handwritten letter to the successor—a rhetorical occasion that not only symbolizes the peaceful transition of power in a functional democracy but also reorients the outgoing president toward a new (and usually less present) public role. At the time of my writing this book review, less than a week after the 2021 presidential inauguration, we still do not know what was said in the letter written by outgoing president Donald Trump to incoming president Joseph Biden. There was much speculation that Trump would not write a letter at all, given that he refused to concede the election and incited a violent riot in the Capitol building before ultimately exiting the White House. The internet, however, exploded with memes speculating about the contents of his letter—a mass culture preoccupation with Trump's farewell address that testifies to the relevance of Justin Sider's argument in Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address, a serious and often brilliant book on the importance of the valedictory mode in Victorian poetry. Sider argues that the valedictory becomes a means for Victorian poets to address their public, using the rhetoric of the farewell as a way to work through their ongoing future relations with their readers. "Through the valedictory," Sider remarks, "Victorian poets imagine what it would be like for poetry to be granted the character and efficacy of public address" (26). In other words, the act of departure becomes for many Victorian poets the most effective means of establishing the future conditions of their reception. Given that Trump's plans for meeting his future public remain a question of considerable importance, I can understand why average U. S. citizens are more than normally [End Page 297] preoccupied with the contents of his farewell letter. Sider's exploration of the valedictory address helps to explain why Victorian poets saw the literary stakes of the valedictory mode as extremely high, and why they so often turned to this mode as a form of future self-assertion. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Sider's book is organized into four substantive chapters. The first explores the way that Alfred Tennyson imagines the defining factor of modern poetic authorship as an idealized orality that must always cede to the materiality of mass print. The second, on the dramatic monologue, argues that the valedictory mode is critical to the genre's ability to produce character and to use that character as a mediating strategy for engaging the public. The third chapter revises the standard line on Matthew Arnold as supposedly so overcome by the failure of poetry that he is driven to withdraw from it by recasting him as a poet who celebrates the address of the retreating figure. Finally, the fourth takes up Charles Algernon Swinburne, a poet who Sider argues ultimately gives up "the rights of the poet" in his relationship to his future public (204). Sider's readings throughout are nuanced and persuasive, moving forward with a brisk momentum that comes from having a strong guiding thesis. In each chapter, Sider argues his case with the self-assurance of a scholar who has read widely and deeply, and who can offer a strong take on authors who left behind exceptionally large bodies of work. One of the main pleasures of this book is that Sider distills complex ideas about these authors into elegant and incisive interpretive claims. For example, consider the following statements: "Tennyson creates an authorial self that seems always to be leaving" (48). Or: "Character is in some sense the tomb that all dramatic monologists are building for themselves" (84). Or: "Arnold's valedictory speeches propose that we will know the poet best after he has left" (151). With so many confident and readable assertions for other scholars to engage with, this book earns its future citations, and I anticipate that it will be...