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Reviewed by:
  • Reading Victorian Poetry by Richard Cronin
  • Isobel Armstrong (bio)
Reading Victorian Poetry, by Richard Cronin; pp. 238. Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, £60.00, $99.95.

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. He is an adept reader of form and meaning, whether this is Walt Whitman’s “heady paratactic expansiveness” (90), or Alfred Tennyson’s incisive alliteration of “falter” and “firmly” in In Memoriam (1850), where “the thirteenth line is firm if read iambically, but falters if trochees are allowed to intrude” (164). He notes that Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) carries only one half rhyme, “breath,” rhyming, with significant hesitancy, with “faith” (qtd. in Cronin 158). If the subject of A. C. Swinburne’s “Anactoria” (1866) is enjoined to crush Sappho’s love with “cruel faultless feet,” his lines “deploy metrical feet that stamp themselves on the reader’s ear just as pitilessly” (126). And in Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855) “the feet, metrical and corporeal, break into a little dance, a soft shoe shuffle” (149).

Cronin’s eye and ear for verbal detail is matched by his capacity to invoke just the right historical detail. The image of the door in Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret” (1862) gains from his reminder that Rossetti sat for the head of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World” in 1853, where Hunt used a quotation from Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door.” He has taken the trouble to check Browning’s reference to George Whitefield’s Hymns for Social Worship (1753) in “Christmas-Eve” (1850), disclosing the relevance of Whitefield’s title to collective worship. This incisiveness extends to Cronin’s capacity for telling epigram: of Tennyson’s Maud (1855) he writes, “I doubt that any poem in English keeps its finger so attentively on its own pulse” (76); of religious feeling he asserts, “It is the atheist poetry of the century that cultivates evangelical fervour more impressively than the Christian” (193).

Both at the beginning and the end of his book he claims that to explore the variety of Victorian poetry is his main project. But I think he is doing something much more searching and original than this unobjectionable but bland assertion suggests. To be sure, his method and organization is calculated to bring out the plenitude and heterogeneous experiment in Victorian poetry. Cronin imaginatively juxtaposes a range of poets, male and female, in each chapter—Tennyson, Augusta Webster, Browning, the Spasmodics, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Amy Levy, for instance—not allowing any one to take precedence. (Though Dante Gabriel Rossetti, deservedly through Cronin’s subtle readings, takes an unusually prominent place.) The mix of poets is paralleled by an eclectic mix of texts. Chapter 6 is an example, where cohabit Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” (1870), Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830) and Idylls of the King (1859–85), Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864) (this last given a particularly sophisticated and thoughtful reading), and Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

Cronin’s hidden project begins in his first chapter, where, through brilliant and enjoyable close readings of Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art” (1833, revised 1842), Rossetti’s “The Burden of Ninevah” (1856), and John Davidson’s “The Crystal Palace” (1908), he brings together three poems concerned with a new culture of display exemplified by the museum and popular spectacle at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. He examines the Victorian poet’s unease with the democratization of culture, with poetry’s isolation from daily life, and with its compromised status as a secondary form freighted [End Page 556] with the weight of history. A troubled aesthetic of fracture emerged, but one that responded to the new modern situation with vitality and inventiveness.

I take from Cronin’s argument that it was the aesthetics of fracture, so concerned with belatedness, that paradoxically gave Victorian poetry its originality, its unique energy and creativity. The central chapters explore the many ways the formal expression of that fracture emerge—the double poem...

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