Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (review)

Literal-minded readers might carp at the title: Electric Meters is not just about electricity or just about meter. It expands on recent work in physiology and poetics by focusing on a trope that covers rhythmic jolts, auditory effects, images of magnetic fields, lightning, and the expression of emotion—all in the context of scientific experiment, invention, and materialist philosophy. Electricity "offered Victorian poets a figure for thinking through the effects of poetry on communities of readers" (2), writes Jason R. Rudy. In a study that covers Victorian poetry, reviews, and essays on poetics, this figure bridges the "gap between physiological experience and mental cognition" (6), one that frequently divides the discussions in the book. Talking and theorizing about electricity differ from actually feeling it, and Rudy includes poems and essays that together do both.

The book begins with poems by Felicia Hemans and Mary Robinson that portray physical feeling without miming the physiological experience of emotion. Chapter 2 sets the work of Alfred Tennyson amid 1830s discussions about physiological sensation and the political and poetical concerns it raised. Although J. S. Mill believed that eventually a kind of generative grammar would map out and thereby predict thoughts and feelings, others, like Henry Taylor, author of the metrically numbing Phillip van Artevelde (1834), considered affections and passions idiosyncratic and apt to reinforce class factions when left unregulated. Maud (1855), Rudy notes, was the "most significant excursion into physiological poetics and [the poet's] most vehement rejection of those aesthetic principles" (107).

On the other hand, The Princess (1847), to which Rudy devotes more attention, adopts a "telegraphic model of communication" through "formal maneuvers that mimic the work of an electrified circuit" (65, 64). Rudy's chief analogy for this image is a 1746 experiment in which Jean Antoine Nollet produced a "communal spasm" in a large group of Carthusian monks connected to each other with electrical wire (6). But the argument, in particular Rudy's claims that the poem suggests the "physiological nature of 'truth' as it moves through crowds of individuals" (67), needs elaboration. Elsewhere, Rudy forges an effective connection between "Break, break, break" (1842), Thomas Hood's "The Song of the Shirt" (1843), and G. W. Russell's "The Song of the Plug" (1877). The inexpressibility topos in the first lyric becomes the representative voice of collective labor in Hood's "Stitch! stitch! stitch!" (qtd. in Rudy 70) and, finally, a "community of voices united through telegraphic communication" (73). Rudy shows a sense of fun and a collector's eye for all things telegraphic and electric throughout the book. His efforts are most rewarding here.

Rudy's treatment of the Spasmodics in chapter 3 is the pulse of the book and a significant contribution to the study of Victorian poetry. It follows the poetic career of Sydney Dobell through his long, unfinished poem Balder (1853), his 1857 lecture, "The Nature of Poetry," and England in Time of War (1856). As Rudy shows, the argument of "The Nature of Poetry" corresponds with the theories of the prominent philosophers and scientists who sided against the mentalists. Alexander Bain argued for the dependence of thought on neuromuscular movement, Herbert Spencer for a direct connection between feeling and motion. Similarly, Balder's uneven rhythms tried to "transmit … actual, felt experience" to readers by "getting beyond words to the inner ideas and feelings that words are meant to conjure" (93). Rudy's choice of materials provides a fascinating overview of the British poetic scene in the 1850s. The literary reviews, many of them scathing, published by William Aytoun in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and his burlesque review of a nonexistent Spasmodic closet drama, the reaction of Coventry Patmore to Tennyson's poetry: these and more are brought into the debate over the social and political implications of a physiological poetics.

Rudy's discussion of Patmore reveals a poet increasingly wary of physiological experience. Versions of his Poems (1844) follow the rise and fall of the Spasmodics. His Essay...