Poetic Address: Shaking the Hearts of Men

Chapter 4 takes four major poems of the 1850s and analyses them through the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 3. It examines Tennyson’s In Memoriam as the poem made to stand for the voice of the Victorian age and analyses how the employment of pronouns creates that identity. A reading of Maud argues that Tennyson then critiques print culture and challenges the dominant public mode of poetry insisted on by reviewers. Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows and Clough’s Amours de Voyages offer examples of poets using address to experiment with a public poetics. Staging their poems outside England, both seek to expand what it means to write poetry for the British public.

Poetic Address: ‘Poet’s Public’ and ‘Public’s Poet’

Chapter 3 delineates the theoretical context for the employment of address by Victorian poets. It identifies three kinds of poetic address as most significant for poetry in the 1850s, a solitary, lyric ‘I’, a dramatic ‘I’–‘you’ address, and the collective pronouns ‘we’ or ‘us’. Poets were called upon to address a national audience, but those addresses were mediated by reviewers, who evaluated whether or not a poem would appeal to the public. The chapter examines how address is integral to the review’s mediation of the relationship between the poet and the mass public. It analyses the Spasmodic school of poetry through Philip Bailey’s Festus and Alexander Smith’s A Life-Drama, followed by analysis of Matthew Arnold’s poems, ‘Resignation’ and Empedocles on Etna.

Poetic Voice: Evanescence and Animation in Early Victorian Verse

Chapter 1 examines the mechanization of print and the changes to literary publishing in the commercial market of the 1820s and 1830s. It investigates mechanical reproduction as a formal phenomenon and argues that the mechanized production of poetry produces a rupture within poetic voice. The dialogue identified across the poems and the reviews focuses on the relation of sound and meaning. Two key concerns are the material nature of poetic voice when it is commodified and copied for a mass market and the traversing of voice from poet to reader. Landon, Hemans, and Tennyson are compared to Wordsworth to establish the difference between early Romantic and late Romantic/early Victorian verse. The three case studies are Landon’s periodical poetry for The Literary Gazette, poetry from Tennyson’s early 1830s and 1842 volumes, and Browning’s Pauline.

Poetic Style: Jewellery and Value in Victorian Poetry

Chapter 2 examines evaluations of poetic style from the 1830s to the 1860s and argues for the existence of a jewelled style which crosses over the genres of the album-book or anthology, the single-author volume and the periodical review. The intersection of raw economic value with fashionable display and artistic craft that coalesces around the jewel overlaps with the commodification of poetry as it circulates in the literary market. Jewellery becomes an important trope in both reviews and poetry, serving as a metaphor to express and calculate the kind of value that literature could offer. As a material commodity newly subject to mechanical reproduction, jewellery offered an analogy for the material changes to literary production. The chapter analyses poetry from gift annuals which exemplify the jewelled style, followed by a reading of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile.

Introduction

The Introduction offers a background to the Victorian poet and Victorian poetry. The concepts of popularity and intrinsic merit are discussed, and literary criticism is examined through several periodicals that enjoyed a wide readership. The power that reviewers held over the reception of poetry was both commercial and critical, and the spontaneity of writers could be eradicated by the reviewing culture. Although it was impossible not to be conscious of the periodical reviewing culture, poets had to affect an ignorance about writing for this specific audience. In order for their work to be considered truthful and sincere, poets were expected to be oblivious of the system that would evaluate and mediate their work to the public. In reviewers’ evaluations of voice, style, and address, there is a concern with how poetry is mediated in the Victorian period.