Reading Victorian Poetry E-Book

Richard Cronin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Reading Poetry
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 451

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Reading Victorian Poetry "Richard Cronin's exceptionally fine book carries out just what its title promises - reading. The pleasure of his adroit, meticulously imaginative insights into verbal and metrical effects is constant ... One of the best general readings of Victorian poetry in the last ten years." Victorian Studies "Reading Victorian Poetry will make an excellent introduction to Victorian poetry and gives a good account of a number of key issues." English Studies Reading Victorian Poetry offers close readings of poems from the Victorian era, carefully selected by the author to reflect the breadth and diversity of nineteenth-century poetry. Richard Cronin's outstanding consideration of a wide range of poets reflects the unusual diversity of Victorian poetry, which includes, amongst others, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book investigates key concerns of the era in which poetry was ousted by the novel from the culturally central position that it had enjoyed for centuries. The result is an important and exciting contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century poetry, and a crucial resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Victorian Poetry Palace

2 The Divided Self and the Dramatic Monologue

3 Victorian Metrics

4 Short Poems, Long Poems and the Victorian Sonnet Sequence

5 Victorian Poetry and Translation

6 Victorian Poetry and Life

7 Poetry and Religion

8 Conclusion: The 1890s

Bibliography

1 Introduction: The Victorian Poetry Palace

2 Self-Division and the Dramatic Monologue

3 Victorian Metrics

4 Long Poems and Short Poems: the Victorian Sonnet Sequence

5 Victorian Poetry and Translation

6 Victorian Poetry and Life

7 Victorian Poetry and Religion

8 Conclusion: the 1890s

A Note on Texts

Index

Reading Poetry

The books in this series include close readings of well known and less familiar poems, many of which can be found in the Blackwell Annotated Anthologies. Each volume provides students and interested faculty with the opportunity to discover and explore the poetry of a given period, through the eyes of an expert scholar in the field.

The series is motivated by an increasing reluctance to study poetry amongst undergraduate students, born out of feelings of alienation from the genre, and even intimidation. By enlisting the pedagogical expertise of the most esteemed critics in the field, the volumes in the Reading Poetry series aim to make poetry accessible to a diversity of readers.

Published:

Reading Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Patricia Meyer Spacks, University of Virginia

Reading Modernist Poetry

Michael Whitworth, Oxford University

Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry

Patrick Cheney, Penn State University

Reading Victorian Poetry

Richard Cronin, Glasgow University

Forthcoming:

Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry

Michael Schoenfeldt, University of Michigan

Reading Romantic Poetry

Fiona Stafford, Oxford University

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Richard Cronin

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Richard Cronin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cronin, Richard, 1949– Reading Victorian poetry / Richard Cronin.p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9392-4 (cloth)1. English poetry–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Literature and society–Great Britain–History–19th century. 3. Poetics–History–19th century. I. Title. PR591.C76 2012 821′.809–dc23

2011031525

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For Clare and Alexandra

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Emma Bennett at whose suggestion this book was written, to the whole editorial team at Blackwell and to Dan Leissner the freelance copy editor. This book, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, is the product of conversations, conversations that have taken place over many years, some of them with my colleagues, but most of them with my students. It would be impossible to list all the students to whom I have been indebted in that time, but in this, which is likely to be my last book before my retirement, I would like to acknowledge at least some of those from whom I have learned so much and who have made teaching such a pleasure for almost forty years. I am especially grateful to Anna Barton, Alison Chapman, Carol Collins, Gavin Corbett, Thomas Docherty, Rebecca Domke, Jennie Donald, George Donaldson, Gillian Dow, John Gardner, Misty Gonzalez, Michael Heyman, David Kinloch, Simon Kovesi, Hieronim Kwiatkowski, Tom Leonard, Kyung Ook Lee, Maureen McCue, Chantelle MacPhee, Susan Miller, Katie Murphy, Hye-Young Park, Chankil Park, Rajeswari Rajan, Sumita Roy, Veronika Ruttkay, Jane Stabler, David Stewart, Iain Vaughan, and Ya-Feng Wu, almost all of whom are now teachers themselves. My greatest debt as always is to Dorothy, my best reader.

1

Introduction: The Victorian Poetry Palace

There is no style that Victorian poets share, one reason for which is that they had too many to choose from. They had available to them, as their predecessors did not, the full history of English poetry. They were the heirs, as George Saintsbury puts it, of materials that had been ‘furnished by the thought and work of a score of generations of English poets, by the growth and development of seven centuries of English language and English literature’.1 Saintsbury’s claim might be extended. The first scholarly edition of Beowulf which probably dates from the ninth century was published by Tennyson’s friend, J.M. Kemble, in 1833, and Victorian poets were not familiar only with English literature. Shelley had to teach himself Greek after some lessons from his friend, Thomas Love Peacock, but his successors were, many of them, classically educated at their public schools to a level that neither earlier nor later poets could reach, and some of their female contemporaries such as Elizabeth Barrett and Augusta Webster matched their achievements. Many were also widely read in the poetry of continental Europe and beyond. D.G. Rossetti translated the early Italian poets, Swinburne translated from the medieval French of François Villon, and introduced his countrymen to the contemporary French of Charles Baudelaire. Edward FitzGerald’s translation from the eleventh-century Persian of Omar Khayyam became, after initial neglect, one of the century’s more unlikely best-sellers. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) with its vision of ‘the great world’ spinning ‘for ever down the ringing grooves of change’ (The short-sighted Tennyson explained, ‘When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester I thought that the wheels ran in a groove’) is properly recognized as a quintessentially Victorian poem, but its idiosyncratic eight-stress trochaic line, ‘slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag,’ (162) was probably borrowed by Tennyson from his Cambridge contemporary, Richard Chenevix Trench, who had himself found it employed in a German translation of a poem by another Persian poet, Omar Khayyam’s younger contemporary, Sa’adi Shirazi.2 The British poets of the nineteenth century recognized, too, their debts to their American contemporaries. Arthur Hugh Clough who, because of his family’s American connections, was known to his Oxford friends as Yankee Clough, acknowledged that his own experiments with English hexameters were inspired by a reading of Longfellow’s Evangeline, and the metres of Swinburne and Hopkins bear the impress of their reading of Whitman.

Nineteenth-century poets lay claim to a far wider historical and geographical range than their predecessors. Felicia Hemans is in this respect typical. In her 1828 volume, Records of Woman with Other Poems, she speaks as Sappho in the sixth century BC, as the wife of Hasdrubal at the end of the third, as the wife of Rudolph von Wart in the fourteenth century, the wife of Charles V in the sixteenth, and as Arabella Stuart in the seventeenth. Her geographical range is equally wide, from American Indians to those of the sub-continent, from the Russia of ‘Ivan the Czar’ to the tropical island home that the exile dreams of in ‘The Palm Tree’. Nineteenth-century poets were conscious, as their predecessors had not been, that their poems had to find a place within a great poetry museum, which was, rather like the British Museum itself, remarkable for the breadth and the miscellaneousness of its collections. I begin with three poems, one from the beginning of the period, one from its middle and one from its end, all of which concern museums. All three are poems that reflect upon the state of British poetry in the nineteenth century, and all three poets seem tempted to represent that poetry as defined, rather like the space occupied by the Victorian museum, by its separation from the workaday world.