A. C. Swinburne in the Round: Drama, Personae and Lyric Subjectivity

The first case study of this part of the book teases out of Swinburne’s metrical masochism a perversely chaste account of lyric community, in which poetic form works to imagine a chorus of voices. Starting with poem ‘Anactoria’, one of the best known poems of Poems and Ballads (1866), the chapter analyses the questions of genre and poetic community posed in Swinburne’s early work. Reading on through his oeuvre this impulse might find a natural outlet within Swinburne’s politically-engaged work of the 1870s, but what about the more Parnassian ‘A Century of Roundels’ (1883)? Close reference to this volume, enables the chapter to demonstrate models of lyric collectivity in poems that are far from any ’dramatic monologue’ model—and ultimately provides the tools to offer a fresh engagement with ‘Anactoria’. Comparison with the poems of Oscar Wilde helps focus the issues of poetic subjectivity and connect with Wilde’s infamous d commentary on Swinburne’s poetic subjectivity.

Parnassus and Commodity Time

This second case study of Part I focuses on the English Parnassian revival, and, specifically, on Gleeson White’s definitive anthology of Parnassian poetry (featuring poets such as Graham R. Tomson, W. E Henley, John Payne and A. Mary F. Robinson). The chapter argues for the strict metrical structures of the Parnassian poet as engaging not in a nostalgia for a secure and orderly ideal of the past, but with the machine and commodity rhythms and forms of the ‘second’ industrial revolution. This engagement with the past in fact a means of engaging with the present. Ultimately asking what kind of historicism the new Parnassians were practicing in their borrowing of medieval French forms, the chapter finds models that speak to Benjaminian, post-Enlightenment, ideals, and move lyric away from the older, Hegelian lyric temporalities.

Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

Painting, Music, Touch: D. G. Rossetti’s Ekphrasis and Competing Temporalities

The first of the two case studies on aesthetic poetry and lyric temporality, this chapter explores D. G. Rossetti’s ekphrastic poetry. Through an analysis of the operation of meter in some of Rossetti’s major poems, the chapter argues that poetry can be seen to offer, metrically, a response to some of the key shifts in the understanding of time that challenged the very foundations of a Romantic conceptualization of lyric. The chapter ends with a coda on the temporalities modelled in the poetry of W. B. Yeats (a poet temporally at the margins of the period studied), complicating his invocation of a timeless lyric eternity through an appeal to the modes of metrical reading provided in this chapter.

Introduction

Starting with the idea of the late nineteenth century as a locus of ‘lyric crisis’, the introduction outlines established scholarly narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity in the nineteenth century, and describes how the book will challenge these through its attention to aestheticist poetry. It goes on to explain the remit and choices made in the structure of the book (which is organized around three parts, each of which contains three chapters), and ends by situating the book’s methodology in relation to the fields of lyric studies and lyric theory. The overall aim of the book is stated as the analysis of the relationship between lyric and modernity prior to the better known story of poetic modernisation that occurs within high modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Metre and Temporality: Between Hegel and Benjamin

Chapter 2 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part I’ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric temporality. As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 2 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. It situates aestheticist lyric poetry, historically and conceptually, between Hegelian and Benjaminian ideas of lyric temporality; and argues for the need to read aestheticist poetry’s metrical structures as responsive to this frame. Drawing on a wide range of writings on poetic meter (from Romantic to modernist and beyond), it offers a new understanding of the significance of the strict verse forms revived in the 1870s and popular with aestheticist poets over the rest of the nineteenth century. Ultimately arguing that the revival of medieval verse forms in Parnassian poetry becomes (in certain ways) a response to the pressures of modernity, this chapter offers a new way of understanding the operation of those forms.

Afterword

Poetry is not just a commentary on culture or a reflection of it, but a shaping participant within it. The history of genre, particularly, is the story of the changing ways in which we discuss, describe and think. I suggest that poetry of the period under discussion might be read with greater alertness to its formal negotiation with some of the key philosophical questions of modernity even while, and perhaps particularly when, its content may appear conventional and nostalgic. After all, lyric poetry responded to some of the key conceptual shifts of the nineteenth century because it had to: some of its core generic conventions were deeply challenged by changing ways of thinking and being....

Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity

Chapter 8 is the first of three chapters that make up ‘Part III’ of the book. This part focuses on issues of lyric subjectivity. As the first chapter in this part, Chapter 8 builds a conceptual and theoretical basis that will underpin the poetic case studies offered in the subsequent two chapters. This chapter sets up a frame that positions aestheticist lyric between the legacy of an introspective Hegelian lyric subjectivity that surfaced in British Romantic poetics, and the growing anxiety that prompted the discovery of more communal poetic forms within lyric. Complicating scholarly narratives that see mid-century dramatic monologues as the quintessential nineteenth-century response to such anxieties, this chapter proposes the model of ‘desire lines’ (taken from urban geography) to recognise the capacity of lyric poems of the period to invoke models of lyric chorus, rather than lyric solipsism.

‘Space, the Bound of a Solid’: Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy

The second case study to work with the ideas outlined in chapter 5 uses the highly meta-poetical work of Alice Meynell, together with some of her prose writings, to understand the significance of the sculptural and phenomenological presence of fixed form poems on the printed page. The approach developed from the work of Meynell is then used to uncover in the poetry of Thomas Hardy a somatic poetics that figures an intriguingly material type of lyric transaction through the printed page of the mass-circulated book.

Ezra Pound’s Troubadour Subject: Community, Form and ‘Lyric’ in Early Modernism

This final case study also acts as a historical ‘coda’ to the trajectory of aestheticist lyric traced within this book. It connects it with the twentieth century and with the better known story of lyric within high modernism. Starting with Pound’s intense historical engagement with lyric in the earliest part of his career, and with his troubadour poem ‘Cino’, the chapter opens with an analysis of the significance of community through refrain. It then moves on to trace the substantial influence of aestheticist poets on this early work, and offers an original account of the significance of Ernest Dowson and the Rhymers’ Club for Pound’s work. The chapter ends with an account of modernism’s troubled relationship with the conceptualisation of lyric inherited from the nineteenth century.