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  • The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History
  • Anne Janowitz (bio)
The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History, by Mike Sanders; pp. ix + 299. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, £50.00, $94.99.

Mike Sanders has done exactly the right thing in his contribution to the study of the cultural forms of Chartism. Chartist poetics has had a fairly continuous, though minor, place in the social and cultural study of nineteenth-century working-class history. But since the 1960s, when the rituals and writings of social movements once again became central to British ideas of how to be progressive, transgressive, and comradely, there has been growing interest in the forms and styles of political writing. Poetry often gets bad press in this discussion because it smacks too much of dependence on bourgeois form and often appears to be dangerously emulative. The new rise of poetry since the 1970s, however, and the spread of not only identity-politics poetics but of an increasing [End Page 147] interest in oral poetics—in the aloudness of poetry—and of its rhythmic persuasions has been the source of much new work on political poetry.

So what is the thing that Sanders does so exactly right? He looks at the various interpretations of Chartist literature offered by scholars such as the pioneering work done in the former Soviet Union and client states by P. M. Ashraf and Y. V. Kovalev, and since the 1970s in Anglo-American literary criticism by, among others, Brian Maidment, John Goodridge, Martha Vicinus, Isobel Armstrong, and myself. Sanders shakes himself free of the interpretive logjam, taking the history of the poetry column in the Northern Star as the object of his analytic inquiry. This means accepting that each poetic text in the Northern Star belongs there because it is there, and it means that Sanders allows the notion of what the Chartist poetic might mean to emerge from the boundaries of the periodical rather than from the presentist theories of late-twentieth-century literary critics. As such, I take his rather perfunctory and undeveloped discussion of Jacques Rancière's notions of strategic and aesthetic conceptions of the avant-garde, as well as the jejune understanding of what "imaginary" might mean when part of the Lacanian-Althusserian-Jamensonian phrase, "the Chartist Imaginary" (the title of chapter 1), to be not very well integrated into the body of the study.

Yet once into his survey and taxonomy of the poems published in the Northern Star, the closest thing that Chartism had to a daily periodical, Sanders gets going and produces a far more rounded and layered sense of the range of work that poetry offered the movement. While Sanders and I agree on the main outline of the rise and fall of a Chartist poetic, Sanders does an excellent job of showing the actual vacillations in the production of poetic enthusiasm and enthusiasm for a movement-defined poetic. In addition, the lack of correspondence between some periods of Chartist militancy and those of poetic vitality allows Sanders to make speculative conjectures about how and why this should be the case.

In chapter 4, "Insurrectionary Sonnets: After the Newport Uprising," Sanders shows how the political meaning of the Newport insurgency was reinterpreted to meet the changing position of Chartism with respect to extra-parliamentary means of achieving democratic entitlements for the working person, and he explores the political work that the poet "Iota" carried out in his series, "Sonnets Devoted to Chartism" (1840). Iota replaced the language of battle and militancy with elements from the established liberal discourse of civic humanism, in which rational virtue supervenes upon the brutality occasioned by oppressive conditions.

Sanders remarks that later Chartist poetry often displays a pattern in which "each poem charts a recursive journey which takes the reader from an initial state of contentment (the past) into a time-space of suffering and disorder (the present) before finishing with an invocation of a transformed future which clearly resembles the past" (165). This insight makes me wonder why Sanders gives such short shrift to the place of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth within the Chartist poetic, for he has...

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