Voicing an Epic for the Age in The Prelude and Aurora Leigh

Abstract

Voicing an Epic for the Age in The Prelude and Aurora Leigh Eleanor Reeds (bio) When Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh was published in 1856, its first readers struggled to evaluate the work according to conventional expectations of genre, even as many of them praised its innovative nature. Writing to Robert Browning on 21 November 1856, Bryan Waller Proctor labeled the poem as "something between an epic & an idyll & a ___ I want a something to add to the description" while commending it as able to "induce new things in verse—we have been too much imprisoned by precedents."1 For Robert Bulwer Lytton, however, the uniqueness of the poem did not prevent its participation in a recognizable generic tradition: he declared to its author in December 1856 that Aurora Leigh was "the solitary Epic of this age" (3933). Indeed, the poem's heterogeneity works to assert its epic status for modern critics such as Herbert Tucker, who describes Barrett Browning's combination of "synchronic extension" with narrative progression as characteristic in his study of the genre's development during the nineteenth century.2 Identifying Aurora Leigh as an epic also enables scholars to approach Barrett Browning's poem in the context of William Wordsworth's similar experiment in writing an epic that narrates a contemporary poet's development: The Prelude. This comparative approach takes seriously Barrett Browning's aspiration to be an epic poet, an aspiration that reveals itself in her adaptation of Wordsworth's apostrophic forms of address in The Prelude. In order to participate in such a distinguished generic tradition, both poets had to produce a voice adequate to the task, and they did so by addressing a specific reader whose role all other readers could come to occupy. Focusing on the constitutive role of these individual readers, usually identified as Samuel Taylor Coleridge—albeit a fictionalized version—and Romney Leigh, this essay reveals the parallels between Wordsworth's and Barrett Browning's poetic practice; it also evaluates their divergences, as the lyric device of apostrophe upon which Wordsworth relies is developed by Barrett Browning into a more dialogic mode. While Wordsworth takes advantage of masculine privilege to occupy the role of an epic poet with ease, Barrett Browning depicts Aurora's struggle to exercise the authority of a writer who summons a responsive [End Page 225] reader and her ultimate progress toward not only recognizing but also celebrating the poet's dependence upon the voices of others. By attending to voice, the "I" that may speak to "you," rather than to the formal constraints of the epic as a genre, I show that Wordsworth and Barrett Browning developed a new form of epic for the nineteenth century by reimagining their poetry's temporal relationship to readers in the present and future. In aspiring to be an epic poet, Barrett Browning had to confront deeply gendered beliefs—which persisted despite the success of Aurora Leigh—about the nature of literary production. For instance, a complimentary November 1856 review described how readers of the poem listen both to "the voice of [Barrett Browning's] inner life" and to "the voice of an Isaiah … that voice which speaks like a revelation from heaven, that 'utterance of the gods' which is the attribute of the greatest poets."3 The intimate and personal voice of the woman is distinguished from the voice that asserts Barrett Browning's status as a great poet, a status dependent upon her role as a mere conduit of unearthly powers. Indeed, much to Barrett Browning's amusement, it was apparently rumored in Florence in 1857 that "'Aurora' was written by the 'spirits'" and its author "disavowed any share in it except the mere mechanical holding of the pen-!!!" (3957). In such accounts, the elevated role of a prophet able to commune with the Muses and other divine beings is transformed into the passive role of a spirit medium capable of automatic writing. The former privilege is reserved for male writers alone. More serious discussions of Aurora Leigh in the 1850s still betray such gendered bias toward its author. As Marisa Palacios Knox notes, Victorian critics "could neither avoid defining the aesthetic value of Aurora Leigh...