The Metrical Ass, the Sapphic Jacobin, and the Barberian Homunculus: Southey, Thelwall, Jeffrey, and the Political History of Romantic Poetics

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TIM FULFORD The Metrical Ass, the Sapphic Jacobin, and the Barberian Homunculus: Southey, Thelwall, Jeffrey, and the Political History ofRomantic Poetics P OETIC METER, AS WORDSWORTH REMINDS US, COMES TRAILING CLOUDS OF story.1 It is produced and received in the light of the past verse with which it is associated and the present medium in which it is published. A song in ballad meter printed on a penny broadside and sold on the streets is judged differently from a hexameter epic published in quarto and pur­ chased at a bookseller. A form’s history, as well as its mode of appearance, shapes what it is perceived to say.2 But some historical periods, and some media, are more influential than others. In this essay I examine a particu­ larly influential period—the culture wars ofthe 1790s and early 1800s—and i. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth argues that to use metrical language im­ plies a “formal engagement that [the poet] will gratify certain known habits of association.” Meter holds forth an “exponent or symbol” ofthe “unusual” language ofpoetry (Lyrical Bal­ lads, and Other Poems 1797—1800, eds. James Butler and Karen Green [Ithaca: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1992], 742). 2. See John Hollander: “the metrical choice . . . establishes a kind of frame around the work ... it indicates how it is to be taken, what sort of thing the poem is supposed to be, and, perhaps, taken in historical context, what the poet thought he was doing by calling his curious bit oflanguage a poem at all” (Vision and Resonance: Two Senses ofPoetic Form, 2nd ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], 189). On form as inflected by history, see SusanJ. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in English Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). On verse in laboring-class print culture, see, for example, Anne K. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). SiR, 55 (Winter 2016) 471 472 TIM FULFORD several publication media—books, broadsides, magazines, pamphlets—in order to show how meter became more strongly politicized than hitherto. Meter, by itself, might seem uncontroversial: a merely technical aspect of the poet’s art. But in practice, as Coleridge reminded Wordsworth,3 it is al­ most never considered alone. When received in conjunction with experi­ mental diction and topical subject matter, it acquires political charge. My concern will be with this reception: by the eighteen-teens the highlighting, in reviews and parodies, of prosody as a controversial aspect of contempo­ rary poetry’s formal innovation had made certain meters seem Jacobinical by association with their prior use in radical poetry. The 1790s’ poets most noted for their Jacobinical poetics were shaped by this historical associa­ tion: in their later careers they were moved to defend their work by devel­ oping new theories of meter, to embrace their reputations by producing still more innovative hybrids of metrical, formal, and verbal experimenta­ tion,4 and to attack their critics by criticism and parody of their own. Robert Southey and John Thelwall were at the center of this politiciza­ tion ofpoetry and poetics. In what follows I investigate the effect of Francis Jeffrey’s attacks on their poetic theory and practice. In doing so, I aim to contribute to recent debates in historical poetics5 6 by demonstrating the significance of the class affiliations of certain kinds of meter and form;'’ I also aim to highlight the constitutive role played by parody: an homunculus of five foot one, with a face which upon a larger scale would be handsome, but can now only be called pretty, eenunciating his words as if he had studied eelocution under John Thelwall, of whom indeed he is an Elzevir edition in better binding.7 Thus Robert Southey described his first meeting, in 1805, with a man he had grown to hate: Francis Jeffrey, chief critic of the Edinburgh Review. Southey’s words imply his need to avenge the hostile reviews Jeffrey had 3. Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1983), 2:66—67. 4. On the introduction of less familiar meters in the period, see Andrew Elfenbein, Romanticism...