Tractarian Poetry: Introduction

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau defines belief, "not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true—in other words, a "modality" of the assertion and not its content."¹ We might consider the field of Tractarian poetics in light of such a statement, one in which catholic Anglicans sought to propose and enact their belief in the manner they knew would have the greatest impact: by writing poetry. While content was far from secondary, since Tractarian poetry was reliant on the aesthetic expression and exegesis of doctrinal law, its form loudly announced the belief-system in whose service it had been composed. This system was primarily outlined in a series of ninety pamphlets written between 1833 and 1841 and published under the collective title Tracts for the Times.² John Keble, John Henry Newman, Isaac Williams, J. A. Froude, and E. B. Pusey were amongst the various contributors, many of them poets as well as intellectual clergy concerned with reviving the use of traditional catholic doctrines within the Church of England. The "Tractarians," or "Oxford Movement," as the group became known, sought to reintroduce to Anglican worship the centrality of the Eucharist, daily prayers, feasts and fasts, Apostolic succession, confession, sisterhoods, and also ritual as it was performed through the use of candles, crucifixes, high altars, and incense. Moreover, the movement placed a significant emphasis upon private devotion, personal holiness, and the disciplined, restrained way in which such faith might be practiced and communicated. The best, most oblique and sacred manner of expression available to the believer, according to its adherents, was poetry.

Poetry and religion had long been interconnected, but the eighteenth century in particular had witnessed a surge of interest in their relations, notably through the popularity of the Methodist hymn and biblical paraphrase and also due to Robert Lowth's Oxford Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753). Lowth argued that poetry proceeds from divine inspiration, able to communicate virtue and piety through its rhythm, modulation, and meter. "The language of poetry," he claimed, is "the effect of mental emotion," vehement and temperate alike and able to invoke passionate belief while disciplining the experience such faith delivers: "It is the office of poetry to incite, to direct, to temper the passions, and not to extinguish them," Lowth declared.³ John Keble's own Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1832-41) echo Lowth's focus on the emotional impact religious poetry can effect on the believing reader, underlining the supernatural, sacramental element within poetry as a spontaneous overflow of spiritual feeling. The mode in which such an overflow aesthetically communicated the beliefs of the Oxford Movement was a subject with which Keble became preoccupied in his critical prose and volume of poetry, The Christian Year (1827). That these preoccupations resulted in a movement we might now label Tractarian poetics is significant not only for the immense popularity poetry written in this mode secured in the Victorian period but also for the equally profound distaste of later scholars for its lyrical Christian content.

This distaste meant that G. B. Tennyson's Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode was a landmark publication for modern critics searching for a balanced, insightful commentary on Tractarian poetics when it appeared twenty-five years ago in 1981.⁴ Certainly the striking critical renaissance of recent scholarship addressing Victorian religion and poetry owes a considerable debt to Tennyson. The recent flurry of work on women's poetry, poetic theory, affect, and belief has clearly been encouraged by his important book. Victorian studies has always recognized the influence of Tractarianism on Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but few critics (the rare exceptions being Rodney Stenning Edgecombe and Margaret Johnson) have sought to unpack carefully the extent to which Tractarian ideas of poetics addressed contemporary concerns. As a result, the Tractarian canon has developed into a limited collection of texts (Newman's essays, sermons, and poems; Isaac Williams's tracts on reserve; John Keble's Lectures on Poetry...