Victorian Poets as Precursors to British Poetic Modernism

MLR, .,   characters—a Victorian poet and scholar. While there is much original and compelling discussion here, it is worth considering whether the unusual literary context rather complicates the ultimate meaning of the work in relation to contemporary poetry, and whether this section would have been more profitably given over to the analysis of a handful of stand-alone dramatic monologues by contemporary poets. e subsequent two chapters, which focus on ‘Revisionist Mythmaking’ and postcolonial British identity, provide further well-informed and insightful analyses, both formal and thematic. In tracing the formal and effective features of the genre, Merk astutely observes the diminishing use of ‘setting’ and ‘occasion’, as well as the corresponding feature of ‘dramatic action’ in contemporary examples of the genre. Using Alistair Fowler’s work on literary genres, the final chapter addresses the question of whether the dramatic monologue has passed through the three stages required (formation, development, transformation) to become a ‘modal form’ (p. ). Challenging the temporal dimension of Fowler’s argument, Merk asserts that the dramatic monologue has developed and transformed, without ‘the proper genre having exhausted itself first’ (p. ). She concludes that the dramatic monologue can be seen as a ‘mode’ partly because it has characteristics which are ‘permanently valuable’ (p. ) and that its energies and features manifest themselves in a range of prose works. As this volume demonstrates, the dramatic monologue’s liminal existence is integral to its value. Its ambiguity and slipperiness are the source of its creative power and it continues to influence contemporary writers of prose and poetry alike. ere seems a lot more to be said about the contemporary dramatic monologue, and this is a much-needed and valuable contribution to the field. S H U S R-J Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’. By R T. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Rebecca Tillett has been one of the most important and persistent advocates for the study of contemporary Native American and Indigenous literatures (see particularly her essential Contemporary Native American Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, )). roughout Tillett’s work, there is no text that she has returned to with greater frequency than Leslie Marmon Silko’s notoriously difficult Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, ). Following closely on the heels of an edited collection, Howling for Justice: Critical Perspectives on Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’, ed. by Tillett (Tucson: Arizona University Press, ), Otherwise, Revolution! represents Tillett’s first monograph devoted solely to Silko’s ‘problematic and contentious’ second novel (p. )—and it is a fitting culmination of her thinking to date on the text. Situating her reading within the history of Almanac’s mixed reception, Tillett builds most explicitly on the previous scholarship of David L. Moore, on witnessing and ethics (‘Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: e Circulating Witness in Almanac of  Reviews the Dead’, in Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Louise K. Barnett and James L. orson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), pp. –) and of Joni Adamson, on Indigenous environmental politics and political activism (‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics and the Reemergence of the Pluriverse’, in Howling for Justice, ed. by Tillett, pp. –). By extending these lines of enquiry, she proposes ‘some useful ways of reading Almanac for the reader who is bewildered’ and offers ‘some potential “remedies” for some of the text’s long-standing and entrenched misreadings’ (p. ). In this, Tillett is lucid; as she argues, Silko guides her reader through the dangerous individualistic wilderness of the text to show how cooperation, community and the ability to acknowledge the human and natural world as a holistic whole provides a clear and sustainable ‘remedy’ for the disposability and sterility of late-twentieth-century capitalist culture. (pp. –) Methodologically, Tillett seeks to follow Silko’s lead, centring her analysis on the Earth. Indeed, Tillett posits from the outset that in Almanac ‘the Earth is the central “character” of an exploration of the ways in which “enlightened” scientific detachment is predicated upon a separation of humanity from the natural world’ (p. ). As such, Tillett’s argument hinges on the ways in which such an Earth-centred reading of Almanac most clearly...

Previous articleNext article FreeBritta Martens Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice. Britta Martens. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Pp. ii+285.Patricia RiggPatricia RiggAcadia University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy, Britta Martens offers a compelling overview of authorship in the poetics of Robert Browning. The book is a welcome addition to Browning scholarship after a very lean decade in book-length studies of this major Victorian poet. Martens challenges the long-standing assumption that Browning’s development of the dramatic monologue into a form perfected and nuanced as a trademark standard of excellence is directly related to his retreat from the Romanticist self-expressive poetics that he felt were such an embarrassment in his early work. Excluding the popular dramatic monologues from her study, Martens focuses on poems in which Browning speaks, she suggests, in propria persona, or in his own voice. These poems span his career and enable Martens to trace Browning’s engagement with his reading public in poetic discourse about poetry, authorship, and audience. She points out the tensions that arise from Browning’s sustained ambivalence about the value of the Romantic expressive poem, and she suggests that, in propria persona, Browning works through a process similar in technique to that of the dramatic monologue, a process that enables him to reveal ironically the “biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker Robert Browning” (3). Furthermore, points out Martens, in undermining his own authority as poet, Browning anticipates the modernist erasure of the author that developed throughout the twentieth century.Martens is scrupulous in both her contextualizing research and in her analysis of poetry that she identifies as crucial to tracing the uneven trajectory of Browning’s transformation of his younger, less mature Romanticist poetics into his mature poetics. Although development of her thesis is complicated by Browning’s satire and his unreliable persona, Martens constructs a reasonable and reasoned explanation for Browning’s perplexing tendency to embed poetic discourse in his poetry even as he distances himself from the authorial voice through characteristics specific to the speaker in the context of the poem. In focusing on some of Browning’s most complex and obscure poems and in engaging in critical discourse with a comprehensive list of Browning scholars, she meets the challenges associated with undertaking revisionary readings of any poet, challenges related to her reader’s familiarity with the work, to the exhaustive examination of the work by a long critical heritage, and to recent critical emphasis on less well-known nineteenth-century writers. The book is organized chronologically, beginning with Browning’s entrance into the Romantic tradition in the confessional poem Pauline. The second chapter features Sordello, and the third focuses on Browning’s complex working relationship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. By this point, he was moving away from Romanticism in lyric work that challenged the construct of the Romantic visionary poet. The penultimate chapter deals with The Ring and the Book, which Martens clearly views as a climax in Browning’s non-Romantic expression of his poetics, and the final chapter is concerned with some of the longer dramatic poems of Browning’s later years, when his ambivalence about separating himself completely from the Romantic tradition is clear. All of Martens’s astute analysis is made more interesting by a parallel thread that traces Browning’s precarious balancing of what he perceives readers want from him with what he wants to say to readers. She suggests that the paratext through which Browning speaks directly to readers is evidence of his keen awareness of the complex relationship that manifests itself in various configurations among author, poet-speaker, and reader.In contextualizing her argument in many years of established critical discourse, Martens inevitably travels over some well-worn ground. Her discussion of Pauline, for instance, includes reference to some of Browning’s letters and early prefaces in which he responds to criticism of his poetry. However, she shows that Pauline includes paratexts that make the poem not only a Romantic confession but also a dramatic performance. The chapter on Sordello, which Martens views as a transitional work, offers fresh insight into difficult sections of this complex poem as author and reader simultaneously resist each other and find themselves integrated into what she terms “author-centred and reader-centred models of interpretation” (52). She enters into lively debate with twentieth-century critics who have tackled Sordello, focusing specifically on the Venice digression as the place in which Browning is able to express his “new impersonal poetics” (83). Sordello is the poem in which Browning first splits himself into poetic entities, Martens suggests, with his young “self” represented by the hero, his more mature “self” by the narrator, and his new, advanced “self” by his paratextual author (51). Martens concludes that Browning’s self-awareness in this respect differs from that of Arnold and Clough, who articulate their poetics in prose works separate from the poem. Martens’s perspective on Elizabeth Barrett Browning as both mentor and foil is one of the highlights of the book. She takes issue with those who maintain that Browning felt some rivalry with his wife and suggests instead that when he speaks in his own voice it is clear that he genuinely tries to follow her model even as he uses her as a way to define himself in very different poetic terms. The close reading of “The Guardian Angel” is particularly useful to this exploration of Browning’s resistance to the expressive voice that impedes his “genuine artistic character” (63). Martens also disputes claims that “One Word More” is an expression of Browning’s private feelings and points out his ironic allusions to the Sonnets from the Portuguese. In her discussion of The Ring and the Book, Martens points out Browning’s self-reflective discussion of the complex relationship between poet and reader, a relationship in this case that is determined by the relative nature of truth. In a detailed analysis of Books 1 and 12, she demonstrates Browning’s anticipation of Modernist poetics through the poet-speaker, who is aware not only of the poet’s visionary perceptiveness but also of the relative nature of all truth. She makes the case that in these books Browning establishes a rapport with the British public in what he knows is an increasingly competitive market for poetry. The tension between the poet-speaker as a character in the poem and the author who, in propria persona, undermines the poet-speaker is for Martens a central interest of The Ring and the Book. In her final substantive chapter, Martens focuses on Browning’s later work and on sustained links that she finds between Browning and the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. Browning’s poetics continued to be shaped, she points out, by his reaction to harsh critical reviews and by his awareness of his dependence on his readers.This is an academic book written in a clear prose style. If there is a weakness in this fresh look at relatively little studied elements of the Browning canon, it perhaps lies in the author’s assumption that Browning is indeed speaking in propria persona in all the works included in this study, and I suspect that future critics might challenge the sometimes tenuous distinction Martens makes between authorial voice and poet-speaker. However, the analysis is convincing and intelligent, inviting us to enter into a nineteenth-century discourse on poetics and authorial presence. The bibliography is comprehensive and reflects the carefully contextualized analysis of Browning’s culture and experience. The index, with well-conceived subentries, indicates the nuanced distinctions Martens makes as she situates her work within the significant critical body of Browning scholarship to date, enhancing the book’s usefulness to scholars working not only on Browning but on Barrett Browning and on other authors who provide the critical context for this study. Scholars working more generally on the whole area of the cultural production of poetic texts will appreciate the ground Martens has broken with respect to Robert Browning’s authorial presence constructed to enable him to articulate his developing system of poetics. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671963 Views: 278Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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...

Epic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality. Matthew Arnold’s prescriptions for translating Homer conveyed a sense of the responsibility involved in disseminating classical texts to a new readership. The Iliad was appropriated in debates on divorce, masculinity, authorship, and the historical criticism of the Bible. The Odyssey offered an alternative, novelistic version of Homeric epic, one which prioritized domesticity and highlighted the poem’s female characters. Some of the most influential creative responses to the epic tradition were not poems in twelve or twenty-four books but verse novels, dramatic monologues, or theatrical burlesques. Others took up the challenge of writing at epic length and addressing national concerns. For aspiring epic poets, there were many choices to be made: should poetry inhabit a mythological world, whether Arthurian (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse) or Norse (William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung), or a contemporary domain like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Might the epic be used to intervene in religious controversies or political conflicts such as Chartism? Could a modern poet be the Virgil of the British Empire? Facing strong competition from the novel, ambitious Victorian poets chose to approach such questions and an astonishing range of themes in a form which evoked vast expanses of time and space, extraordinary physical and intellectual achievement, and literary renown. Yet to achieve recognition as an epic poet remains an unusual distinction. Despite recent critical attention to the proliferation of Victorian poems with epic aspirations, a small number of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, and William Morris have continued to dominate accounts of the genre.

Amy Levy (1861–89) was a Victorian poet and novelist who also wrote essays on literary topics – on poets Christina Rossetti and James Thomson, on American realism, on Jews in fiction – as well as on Anglo‐Jewish life and on women in modern London. She is credited with writing the first Anglo‐Jewish realist novel,Reuben Sachs, and a New Woman novel,The Romance of a Shop. She is the author of three collections of poetry, and her dramatic monologues “Xantippe,” “Magdalen,” and “A Modern Poet” are frequently anthologized, along with shorter lyrics like “A Ballad of Religion and Marriage.”

BOOK REVIEWS 289 Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by NoRMAN WEYAND. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949. Pp. 4lH, with indexes. $5.00. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. By W. H. GARDNER. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. Pp. 304, with index. $4.00. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of his Poetry. By W. A. M. PETERS. New York: Oxford University Press, 194.8. Pp. 213, with index. $4.50. Immortal Diamond, a phrase drawn from one of Hopkin's poems, is a collection of studies by, eleven American Jesuits. It is a very uneven book not in the sense that some of the chapters are sound while others are superficial , but in the sense that the separate studies are suitable to different levels of readers. Several of them serve as an introduction to the poet for those making a first acquaintance while others presume an audience which is already initiated. Herein lies both the strength and weakness of Immortal Diamond. Among the very general introductory studies is, for instance, a biographical sketch of Hopkins in his relation to the Society of Jesus which in a very rounded and balanced manner gives the story of his life from the time of his conversion until his death. It draws heavily on primary materials, especially on the letters, as indeed it should. Occasionally there is some facet which needs illumination. When, for instance, Hopkins at Oxford was considering Rome he wrote in his diary: "Note that if ever I should leave the English Church the fact of Provost Fortescue is to be got over." This is quoted but without any attempt to determine just what "the fact of Provost Fortescue" was, and it·would seem to be a not unimportant hurdle in the story of his conversion. From the essay we do learn one very important new fact: that Hopkins' spiritual diary which has not survived was mistakenly returned to his family after his death and that acting on instructions written on the :flyleaf , his two sisters burnt the diary without reading it. For the past two decades critics have speculated-and sometimes very wildly indeed-as to its whereabouts or the reasons for its destruction, and it is good to have the matter finally settled. A further general essay is d!lvoted to Hopkins as a poet· of nature and of the supernatural and still another to him as a poet uf ascetic and religious conflict. The writer of the latter does not underestimate the gravity and acuteness of such " conflict " but he concludes that all sad portraits of Hopkins cramped by the stern discipline of Jesuit life and living out dismal days of broken hearted frustration among the Jesuits 290 .BOOK REVIEWS may be viewed with a smile of gentle, not to say profound, incredulity. In contrast to these introductory essays is such a study as that entitled "Greco-Roman Verse Theory and Hopkins" which presupposes far more than a superficial knowledge of the theory and practice of classical prosody. Hopkins believed that there were strong similarities between his rhythms and those of the Greek choruses. The writer's thesis is that Hopkins' misunderstandings of Greek and Latin rhythmic usages, which derived for the most part from mistakes of scholars of his age, led his speculation on classical meter over unsafe ground. The essay is challenging and can finally be evaluated only when one takes into consideration Hopkins ' own experiments in Greek poetry which were very recently-certainly too recently for them to be considered here-printed for the first time in the third edition of his poems. The longest study-some eighty pages-is also one of the most valuable. In " Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry " Walter Ong attempts to account for Hopkins' sprung rhythm and his practice against a general pattern of development in English verse. Aware of the tremendous intricacies of the problem, he demonstrates very persuasively that interpretive or sense-stress rhythm demands alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, dramatic suppression of words, telescoping of grammatical structure as invaluable and necessary helps in bringing out the intended meaning. One concludes...

Gerard Manley Hopkins Adrian Grafe (bio) Highly specialized, intricate scholarly approaches to the poet combined in 2019 with more popular, mixed-media ones. The weekly BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time (“Gerard Manley Hopkins,” March 21, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003clk) brought together three academic specialists of the poet—Martin Dubois, Catherine Phillips, and Jane Wright—to discuss Hopkins’s life, poetry, and legacy, as well as the social and literary environments in which he lived and wrote. This was rather a tall order for a forty-minute radio program on a poet whom the presenter, Melvyn Bragg, citing Leavis, called “the greatest Victorian poet.” Bragg’s questions were thoroughly researched and yet were the kind that the listener who was not a specialist of the poet, or even of poetry, but who was curious, would have liked to ask. The program thus stressed Hopkins’s difference: difference from the rest of his family and from most of his Oxford tutors and friends—future poet laureate Robert Bridges, for one—in his decision to convert to Roman Catholicism; difference from other post-Romantic Victorian poets in the high degree of experimentalism he brought to his art; and difference from his working-class parishioners in Glasgow and Liverpool in particular, due to his upper-middle-class English background. By alluding to the “danger” that [End Page 350] adhered to Catholicism during Hopkins’s time at Oxford, Bragg, discerningly if perhaps inadvertently, put his finger on one of the great attractions of the Catholic faith for Hopkins, who was instinctively a contrarian and risk-taker. Bragg termed Hopkins a writer of “nature poetry.” Hopkins may, in fact, be deemed to have adopted the Scotist view of the univocity of nature and supernature. From this point of view, nature is certainly worthy of celebration in and for itself. But nature for Hopkins is a site—perhaps for him the supreme site—in which God reveals Himself to the poet: “he is under the world’s splendour and wonder” so “I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand” (from stanza 5 of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. N. H. MacKenzie [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990], p. 120; this volume is hereafter abbreviated to PW). Hopkins’s post-Romantic worldview inherited the Romantics’ view of nature while Christianising it. The argument propounded by certain critics, Seamus Heaney1 among them, that some of Hopkins’s sonnets are made up of an octave of natural description followed somewhat artificially by a sestet of Christian doctrine (as though to do penance, as it were, for the octave) needs to be adjusted in the light of the imagery of poems which appear to conform to this view, but which, in reality, contain imagery in the octave that can be said to express a religious perspective. But it is also true that Hopkins’s faith and austere religious life gave him the freedom or “license”—one of his favorite words, as was pointed out in the program—to revel in the beauties of the natural world. Jane Wright caught something of the specificity of Hopkins’s poetry when she referred to his “spotty language” as it appears in “Pied Beauty,” or described “sprung rhythm” as “boingy” [sic]. Catherine Phillips stressed the fact that Hopkins took a keen interest in the literary production of his time, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, writing a poem in answer to one of Christina Rossetti’s (cf. below) and corresponding with his friend Canon Richard Dixon who was himself associated with the Brotherhood (as was another friend and correspondent of Hopkins’s, Coventry Patmore). In this respect, Heather McAlpine, in her clear and thoughtful study, Emblematic Strategies in Pre-Raphaelite Literature (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2019), makes a case for Hopkins as “a participant in the Pre-Raphaelite movement,” while a sentence further on in the same paragraph begins, “For Hopkins, as for other Pre-Raphaelites” (p. 147). One may be tempted to feel these phrases—explicitly including Hopkins within the Pre-Raphaelite “movement,” though not the Brotherhood—slightly overstate (Christina Rossetti referred to the movement as “our ‘school...

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is the greatest religious poet and Jesuit priest of the Victorian age who was born in London in the rapidly changing time, fundamentals, visions and sights. He wrote many poems such as “The Windhover”, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, “God’s Grandeur”, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”, “I Wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”, “Carrion Comfort”, “Pied Beauty”, “Felix Randal”, “Binsey Poplars” and “Thou art indeed just, Lord” but none of them was published in his life. when he decided to become a Jesuit, he burned all his literary works as he felt that they were against the principles of his Catholic religion. His friend, Robert Bridge kept a copy of his poems and published them in 1918. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins infused his personal religious devotion into his poetry. The Windhover reflects his intense spiritual connection. For him The Windhover is “the best thing I ever wrote”. The Windhover is not the love poem which is addressed to any person, (even though “To Christ our Lord”), but to the life itself. The Windhover is the masterpiece of Hopkins style, imagery, in which he fuses the beauty of nature with the divine and religious believes. In order to reach his goal, Hopkins used figures of speech, sprung rhythm and different forms of sound patterning. This study is a stylistic analysis of The Windhover from the graphological, phonological, lexical, structural and semantic points of view. The Windhover stands out for its innovative style, vivid imagery, and seamless integration of nature and faith, a combination that distinguishes it from other religious poems. Keywords: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Victorian poet, The Windhover, Stylistic Study.

Although Father Walter J. Ong is most widely known for his orality–literacy scholarship, we do well to bear in mind that his most advanced formal training was in literary studies. From early on in these studies, the figure he wrote about and continued to write about throughout his life was the poet, and fellow Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ong was drawn to Hopkins in large part for the bearing of his writing on the evolution of human consciousness. Ong discovered in his Master’s thesis on Hopkins’ sprung rhythm – written under Marshall McLuhan – that Hopkins was in some sense hearing in advance the sounds of what would become twentieth-century modernism. Hopkins displayed a sensibility and awareness that were compelling for the modernist writers of the twentieth century, as they carried out their experiments with finding new voices, new ways of writing poetry for the changed world in which they found themselves. Hopkins’ feel for the distinctive self, seeking connection with other selves in the uncertainties of time, played no small role in this appeal. Ong’s work on Hopkins is a model for both literary criticism and studies in the evolution of consciousness.

In looking at the Victorians in the context of the development of ‘literary’ modes of understanding theology, this article presents a generic organization that highlights the way in which literary form shapes theological meaning. The second section of the article explores the novel, which became the dominant literary form during this period. Victorian poets also provide an account of the age's engagement with Christianity. The third section focuses primarily on the dramatic monologue, perhaps the single-most-important literary invention of an age when the theatre itself is widely regarded as having undergone a relatively barren time. The point of the dramatic monologue, the discussion argues, is that it explores the particular significance of a particular individual's experience of religion in a particular place and time.

This book examines Victorian poetry's preoccupation with studying the mind. It argues that Victorian poets, inheriting from their Romantic forerunners the belief that subjective thoughts and feelings were the most important materials for poetry, used their writing both to give expression to mental processes and to scrutinize and analyse those processes, and it considers why and how psychological analysis became an increasingly important element of poetic theory and practice in the mid-nineteenth century. This development coincided with the rise of the scientific discipline of psychology and with the growing recognition that the workings of the mind could be studied using the analytical methods of science. The writings of Victorian poets often employed similar methods, but, at the same time, the language and tone of their psychological verse, and especially their ambivalent use of terms such as ‘brain’, ‘mind’, and ‘soul’, voiced an unresolved tension, felt throughout Victorian culture, between materialist, physiological theories of psychology and metaphysical or religious accounts of selfhood. This book considers the poetry of Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, and George Eliot, offering detailed readings of several major Victorian poems (including Amours de Voyage, In Memoriam, Maud, and The Ring and the Book) and presenting new evidence of their authors' interest in contemporary psychological theory. Ranging across lyric verse, epic poetry, and the dramatic monologue, the book explores the ways in which poetry simultaneously drew on, resisted, and contributed to the spread of scientific theories of mind in Victorian Britain.

Editors' Preface. Chronology. Notes on Contributors. 1. Victorian Poetics: Carol T. Christ: Varieties and Forms. Epic: Herbert Tucker. Domestic and Idyllic: Linda Peterson. The Lyric: Matthew Rowlinson. The Dramatic Monologue: E. Warwick Slinn. The Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence: Alison Chapman. Elegy: Seamus Perry. Hymn: J. R. Watson. Nonsense: Roderick McGillis. Verse Novel: Dino Felluga. Verse Drama: Adrienne Scullion. Working-Class Poetry: Florence Boos. The Classical Tradition: Richard Jenkyns. Arthurian Poetry and Medievalism: Anthony H. Harrison. Poetry in Translation: J.-A. George. Tractarian Poetry: Stephen Prickett. The Spasmodics: Richard Cronin. The Pre-Raphaelites: David Riede. Poetry of the 1890s: Chris Snodgrass. 2. Production, Distribution and Reception. The Market: Lee Erickson. Anthologies and the Making of the Poetic Canon: Natalie M. Houston. Reviewing Poetry: Joanne Shattock. Poetry and Illustration: Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. 3. Victorian Poetry and Victorian Culture. Nationhood and Empire: Margaret Linley. Poetry in the Four Nations: Matthew Campbell. Poetry and Religion: W. David Shaw. Poetry and Science: Alan Rauch. Landscape and Cityscape: Pauline Fletcher. Vision and Visuality: Catherine Maxwell. Marriage and Gender: Julia F. Saville. Sexuality and Love: John Maynard.

Meter and Modernist Prose:Verse Fragments in Woolf's The Years Chris Townsend (bio) "(To break the pentameter, that was the first heave)."1 Here are two ways of reading this often-quoted, parenthetical line of Ezra Pound's. One is that it describes modernism's relation to its own recent past as a "definitive break with Victorian poetics": between traditional meters, typified by iambic pentameter, and the "free" verses of modernism and of modernity.2 In such a reading, Pound is understood as being a party to the successful breaking of the pentameter, and as a celebrator of its destruction in the name of poetry unfettered. A second reading, though, runs as follows: the (self-reflexive) modernist poets recognized that their experiments in verse, whilst marking a departure from Victorian measures, were also continuous with what Meredith Martin has shown was a great proliferation, profusion, and confusion of metrical types in the Victorian period.3 Verse was already in some sense free long before it had been openly declared so, and, if the pentameter was broken at all, it was through a long and drawn-out process of being gently bent or contorted until brittle—not through any sudden and violent heave. Hence Pound's possibly ironical parentheses in the above quotation, and that line's absence of an active subject—implying that the line is not a poet's boast, but the expression of a widespread "false dogma."4 Hence the appearance of five-beat lines elsewhere in Pound's poetry, including in that very same "Canto." Hence, too, T. S. Eliot's broader recognition that "the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse"—casting traditional measures as a Polonius-like spectral presence that lingers on into modernity.5 [End Page 475] It is just such a spirit that Adam Piette hears "echoing within modernist poems": "the Victorian strain persists," he writes, "as a ghostly voice of the thing most despised, as a father and mother memory for the twentieth-century orphan-artist."6 The spirit of regular verse may not have broken along with the shell of the pentameter; it may perhaps have survived to operate behind the more complex verse forms of modernity, detectible through the surface movements of language. Much scholarly work has been undertaken to reveal the complex and overlapping—rather than straightforward and linear—relation of Victorian meters to modern free verse that I have just sketched in miniature. Far less, though, has been said about the positioning of modernist prose in relation to this narrative. One consequence of the conscious decision of writers to move away from meter, at least in its explicit guises, was the diminishment of a previously dominant distinction between poetry and prose: that poetry occurs in verse, and prose does not. This diminishment led to, amongst other things, the emergence of the sometimes vexed, sometimes vexing category of the "prose poem" in the early twentieth century. It also led to anxieties about what poems and novels were supposed to be doing, or what they were supposed to be. Modern poets found themselves in the unprecedented position of being, in the words of Timothy Steele, "forced to compare their art, which was metrical and which appeared to be in a state of decline, with an ascendant form of fiction produced without meter"; for Steele, the "Ford-Pound maxim that 'verse must be at least as well written as prose if it is to be poetry' was converted into the idea that verse might profitably be written, as was the novel, without meter."7 There is also, though, a sense in modernist writing that this relationship could be reciprocal—that prose could be written as if it were to be poetry. Virginia Woolf frequently alludes to such a relationship in her essays: of "poetry changing easily and naturally into prose, prose into poetry."8 Scholarly discussions of any "poetic" or "lyrical" character in Woolf's prose usually understand those terms as markers of heightened diction or convoluted syntax, or else suggest that Woolf's poetic prose can "be loosely understood as the expression of an intensely subjective emotion or spirituality."9 But...

Fossil Poetry provides the first book-length overview of the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry in English. It addresses the use of Anglo-Saxon as a resource by Romantic and Victorian poets in their own compositions, as well as the construction and ‘invention’ of Anglo-Saxon in and by nineteenth-century poetry. Fossil Poetry takes its title from a famous passage on ‘early’ language in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and uses the metaphor of the fossil to contextualize poetic Anglo-Saxonism within the developments that had been taking place in the fields of geology, palaeontology, and the evolutionary life sciences since James Hutton’s apprehension of ‘deep time’ in his 1788 Theory of the Earth. Fossil Poetry argues that two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism took place over the course of the nineteenth century: firstly, a phase of ‘constant roots’ whereby Anglo-Saxon is constructed to resemble, and so aetiologically to legitimize, a tradition of English Romanticism conceived as essential and unchanging; secondly, a phase in which the strangeness of many of the ‘extinct’ philological forms of early English is acknowledged, and becomes concurrent with a desire to recover and recuperate the fossils of Anglo-Saxon within contemporary English poetry. A wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works of antiquarianism, philology, and Anglo-Saxon scholarship forms the evidential base that underpins the advancement of these two models for understanding the place of Anglo-Saxon in nineteenth-century poetry. New archival research and readings of unpublished papers by Tennyson, Whitman, and Morris is also presented here for the first time.

Parnassian Cosmopolitanism:Transnationalism and Poetic Form Marion Thain (bio) When, in the 1870s and 1880s, the fashion for medieval French verse forms in English poetry resulted in an influx of villanelles, rondeaux, triolets, and other fixed forms, there was often great suspicion among commentators about these immigrant arrivals. Indeed, the lack of attention in more recent years to this prominent moment in Victorian poetic history suggests a continued sense of it as a strange excrescence. There has been some study of the individual writers who contributed (centrally or peripherally) to the vogue,1 but in general those constructing broader narratives of nineteenth-century English poetry dismiss it as a prosodic workshop or ignore it altogether. It would be safe to say it has not generally been considered relevant to the story of the modernization of poetry. Yet, if we are interested in literary history, is it not the numerous embarrassing poems that most require our attention, and are potentially the more revealing of English culture, than the few canonical works that transcend their own time and place? The Parnassian vogue was a larger and more prominent feature within British poetry than is usually acknowledged, and should be visible within our literary histories.2 This essay is particularly interested in the vogue as a case study in cosmopolitan poetics.3 What kind of transnational politics and aesthetics were played out in that fashion for French "Parnassian" poetic forms in English poetry of the 1870s and 1880s? The "big" poems of Europe in Victorian literature have received welcome scholarly attention in recent years,4 but what about the small, minor, and sometimes tiny, poems of Europe? English Parnassianism sits at a juncture between scholarship on Victorian cosmopolitan poetics and the newly burgeoning field of scholarship on fin-de-siècle cosmopolitan poetics.5 Lost to some extent between both fields, it is nonetheless a landmark in the history of Victorian poetry's attempt to reach beyond national boundaries to remake itself. Ultimately, I argue that this cosmopolitan poetics brings a tangible politics into the heart of this "art for art's sake" experiment with form. [End Page 463] The name of the vogue is a reference to the nineteenth-century French journal, Le Parnasse contemporain, issued in the 1860s and 1870s, which inspired the English revival. Indeed, many English Parnassian poems were translations of works by the writers published in the journal, which notably included Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. The profile of the English Parnassian movement has been outlined by others, so I will not repeat that narrative here, although I will introduce something of the poetic context.6 The 1860s and 1870s saw a battle over form between the traditional and tired, but established, forms of English verse and the need for a new formal energy. The new formal energy came in various guises, but it must be recognized that the revival of Parnassian forms was in this sense a modernizing impulse at this time, as much as was Hopkins's sprung rhythm, and Swinburne's return to sapphic meters. It is not uncommon to read poems such as John Payne's "Ballade" (included in William Davenport Adams's 1878 selection of Parnassian verse and also in Gleeson White's 1887 Parnassian anthology), which asks precisely why poets are turning to poetic forms of the past and replies that it is because "our task is yet undone." Some quotation from this poem will serve to give a flavor of poetry characteristic of the vogue. Stanza 1 begins: What do we here who, with reverted eyes, Turn back our longing from the modern airTo the dim gold of long-evanished skies, When other songs in other mouths were fair?7 Stanza 3 elaborates: Songs have we sung, and many melodies Have from our lips had issue rich and rare;But never yet the conquering chant did rise, That should ascend the very heaven's stair, To rescue life from anguish and despair.Often and again, drunk with delight of lays, "Lo!" have we cried, "this is the golden oneThat shall deliver us!"—Alas! Hope's raysDie in...