Yet, because
this shift occurs within a century of extraordinary
expansion in the availability of printed materials,
the reading public, urban society, and Britain’s
territorial claims, the number and diversity of
people reading and writing poetry in English in
the nineteenth century is greater than ever before.
The extraordinary debate in which much Victorian
poetry is engaged, therefore, has at its core
self-doubt (What can poetry do? What should it
do? Should it speak to its audience like a fellow
passenger on the omnibus or sing to it from Parnassian
heights?). The diverse shapes and colours of the
poems that emerge reflect an increasingly schismatic,
democratic epoch in poetic history that evolves
many different solutions to the problems of poetic
voice, form, and language.
The study of Victorian poetry was for much of
the twentieth century hampered by stigma and stereotype.
A negative image arose of Victoriana as ‘feminine’
poetry, trapped, like Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’
in a cycle of dependence, repetition, nostalgia:
limply fecund yet woefully moribund. Ezra Pound,
writing during World War I, opined that, with
all respect to its achievements, future poetry
readers would look back on the nineteenth century
‘as a rather blurry, messy sort of a period,
a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of period’.
His first two adjectives remain fair – to
the extent that any review of nineteenth century
poetry reveals ‘period’ lines to be
tangled and blurred that teaching syllabi once
preferred to treat as neat and distinct. For example,Wordsworth,
the arch-Romantic, is a Victorian laureate, his
masterpiece The Prelude first published,
like Shelley’s Defence of Poetry,
as a Victorian text. On the other hand, Pound’s
characterisation of nineteenth century poetry
as sentimentalistic and mannerish tells a little
truth at the expense of a greater falsehood. One
of Modernism’s tactical slurs against its
parents, it obscures the debt of Pound’s
own sinewy, performative, intellectually omniverous
work to, among others, Robert Browning and Algernon
Swinburne. T.S. Eliot owes similar debts of honour
to Alfred Tennyson and to James Thomson; W. B.
Yeats to William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti;
W. H. Auden to what he positively describes as
the long tradition of nineteenth century ‘light
verse’. Preferring to see women’s
writing of the nineteenth century as defined by
the novel, early twentieth century standard-bearers
of the Great Tradition repressed the remarkable
achievements of three generations of gifted, prolific,
and influential Victorian woman poets, ignoring
also the symbiotic relationship between poetry
and prose for many women writers (the Brontë
sisters, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell) of the
period. One of the achievements of academic criticism
of Victorian poetry over the last three decades
has been dismantling Modernist myths about ‘Victoriana’
and recovering the capacity of so many Victorian
poems to surprise, challenge, disorient, tease,
and beguile.
I am a lecturer in English at the University of
St Andrews with a research specialism in nineteenth-century
poetry and illustration, especially grotesque
poetry, children’s poetry, and comic poetry
– three categories often linked and often
marginalized. I am currently at work on a book
about the poetry of Thomas Hood, who wrote in
all these modes. Hood was a household name throughout
the nineteenth century, one of the family and
part of the mental furniture of Victorian life.
In looking at his poems and illustrations - the
blackly humorous ballads about body-snatchers;
the urban vignettes on such commonplace (yet poetically
underrepresented) topics as house fires, naughty
children, and unwelcome guests; the punning protest
poems about sweated labour and overweening capitalism
– I hope to re-explore neglected aspects
of Victorian verse that shed light on the continuing
role of play (and its opposition to the tyranny
of work) in reading and writing poetry.
Useful free internet resources for those interested
in Victorian poetry are of several different kinds:
the selection below is both a personal list of
bookmarks and a sketch of various available types
of site
| If
you would like to study Victorian Poetry
further at university undergraduate or postgraduate
level, click
here. |
Archives and
Databases:
The Victorian Web is a good
place to start - an archive with user-friendly
links to topics in Victorian life and literature.
http://www.victorianweb.org/
The Voice of the Shuttle provides
an invaluable database and
set of links. Its Victorian literature pages
are at http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2751
The Victorian Database
http://www.victoriandatabase.com/
Journals:
Victorian Poetry
For those seeking access to recent criticism,
this is the online site for a peer-reviewed
scholarly journal devoted to British and colonial
poetics of the Victorian age (1830-1914). Selected
back issues are posted at:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/
Nineteenth-Century Literature
http://www.ucpress.edu/scan/ncl-e/
Societies/
pages devoted to the work of particular authors:
John Clare
These pages on the poet supplied by John Goodridge
at the University of Nottingham, are models
of their kind. This site offers useful links
to the Clare Society and its Journal.
http://human.ntu.ac.uk/clare/
The Thomas Hardy Association offers
similarly impressive resources and an opportunity
to join in online debate about a different poem
each month.
http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Welcome/welcomet.htm
Robert Louis Stevenson
http://dinamico.unibg.it/rls/rls.htm
William Morris Society
http://www.morrissociety.org/writings.html
Scholarly groups working
on a particular project:
The Victorian Women Writers Project
is admirable and fascinating.
http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/
As a scholar, you can also consider contributing
to Jerome McGann and David Seaman’s British
Poetry 1780-1910: An Archive of Scholarly
Electronic Editions at the Electronic Text Center,
University of Virginia Library, a collective
endeavour of which the Victorians would have
been proud:
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo/britpo-describe.html
Electronic texts of
Victorian poetry, concordances etc.:
Project Guttenberg
Among many useful, otherwise hard-to-find
texts is a posting of James Thomson’s
‘The City of Dreadful Night’
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext98/ctdnt10.txt
The Swinburne Project’s ongoing
posting of his poetry
http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/swinburne/contents.html
The Victorian Sonnet for its diversity
of content
http://members.aol.com/ericblomqu/victoria.htm
Gerard Manley Hopkins - a concordance
to his work
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/wics.htm
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