The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius Matthew Rowlinson (bio) The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius, by Dino Franco Felluga; pp. xi + 208. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, $65.00, $23.95 paper. As its full title suggests, Dino Franco Felluga's The Perversity of Poetry is a work of considerable interdisciplinary ambition. Perversity; poetry, gender, genius, and the popular; Romantic ideology: each of these terms and sets of terms comes with a long history and each is currently the topic of its own body of theoretical and historical criticism. A study aiming to mobilize them all is likely to do so with uneven effect, as is the case here. Besides its conceptual breadth, Felluga's work also straddles the historical and disciplinary boundary that too often divides the study of Victorian culture from that of the Romantic era. The book's principal subject is the figure of the genius as it is projected in the poetry of Walter Scott and Lord Byron and in their critical reception. A coda treats Alfred Tennyson as Scott and Byron's successor, who was given the task of constructing a poetic stance in the contradictory and, Felluga argues, culturally marginal position bequeathed him by his precursors. The book's focus is on poetic romance, especially Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1818–23), and Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859–85). This choice of genres is determined by a theoretical argument that casts poetry as a [End Page 366] staging of fantasy, whose fate in the nineteenth century was to lose its cultural authority to the realist novel. It is in the more historically specific and richly contextualized strands of its analysis, particularly those dealing with Byron and his reception, that this book makes its greatest contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture. These strands are bound up with others, however, in which the formal symmetry of his argument leads Felluga to gloss over important historical distinctions. The pairing and contrast of Scott's and Byron's poetry is an organizing principle of the book. As Felluga documents, this pairing was a commonplace in criticism of the Romantic era, and Byron's verse romances were viewed as a powerful and largely negative example of poetic genius throughout the nineteenth century. To make a similar claim regarding Scott's persistence as a type of the poetic genius, however, he is obliged to ignore a distinction he elsewhere views as crucial, between the generic histories of prose fiction and poetic romance. Much of the evidence given for Scott's continuing importance in the nineteenth century refers not to the poems but to the Waverley novels. Felluga's justification for this confusion is that the fantasy structure of Scott's metrical romances constitutes "the mechanism whereby the emergent capitalist culture of the nineteenth century would secure its disciplinary hold on the people"; though this mechanism principally operates in "middle-class fiction," its logic is "first popularized" in Scott's poetry, to which the novel thus owes a debt that "has been insufficiently acknowledged" (45). The claims here are too broad to be falsified; no evidence, however, is offered either for the disciplinary effect of fantasy in the nineteenth century or for fiction's debt to Scott's poetry. Felluga's major example of the supposed cultural effect of Scott's poetry is an account of the author's stage-management of the royal visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, the first by a Hanoverian monarch. This event culminated in a levee, at which Scott persuaded George and the Edinburgh gentry who attended him to don full Highland dress, with the monarch himself in Stuart tartan. As Felluga suggests, the episode provided a template for other political pageants later in the century, such as Victoria's coronation and the Eglinton tournament. By analyzing the royal visit as "medievalizing," however, and setting it in the context of Scott's poetic romances, he obscures its immediate context: the Waverley...