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  • Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible by Charles LaPorte
  • Emma Mason (bio)
Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible, by Charles LaPorte; pp. ix + 284. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, $45.00.

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible is one of a number of new-historical books on religion and literature that work to both dissolve the old dialogue about faith and doubt as the main way into Victorian writing, and also to make obsolete those “histories of religious decline and the so-called death of God” that tend to shape previous mappings of this period (2). With sustained eloquence and control, Charles LaPorte reads Victorian [End Page 557] poetry as entering into a serious negotiation with the shifting and changing hermeneutical status of the Bible, specifically with the higher criticism, as well as offering a reflection on itself as “less as a rearguard action to save religion than as a gamble upon its potential future” (4). In doing so, he offers readings of several long Victorian poems: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), Arthur Hugh Clough’s Dipsychus (1874), Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69) and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and The Legend of Jubal (1870).

LaPorte frequently dazzles readers with his percipience and insight: an exceptional close reader, he moves through the prosody and content of these poems with an acumen and speed that sometimes disguise the depth and precision of his interpretations. In his opening chapter, for example, LaPorte gives us a wholly new way of reading Barrett Browning’s “exalted” religious voice, one rooted in “devotional reverence” and “Romantic ambition” alike, indebted to Emanuel Swedenborg, François-René de Chateaubriand, and Richard Strauss and justified in its prophet-poet expression of a personal gospel by the higher criticism (23). Similarly Tennyson is presented as a poet who exploits the higher criticism to celebrate the mythical past of both the Bible and British nationalism; Clough is attributed with anticipating Strauss in his careful rejection of the Victorian association between poetry and scripture; Browning is read as a scientific architect who constructs poetry as a “workshop” of “forensic” experimentation to test the higher criticism (156); and Eliot is portrayed as a would-be poet who sought to rewrite the Bible away from “inspirationism” and “toward a tradition of sentiment and humanism” in line with higher critical objectives (214).

Given the centrality of higher criticism to LaPorte’s argument, a more detailed definition of its impact and force in the period would have been useful. To describe it only as “the revolutionary practice of studying the Christian scriptures as the collected poetry and mythology of an ancient primitive people—as a mythical, rather than a strictly factual, record” is to miss the way in which it enabled, as much as troubled, Christianity (6). The book is also dependent on an outmoded definition of Romanticism, forged as it is through J. Hillis Miller’s proclamation that the Romantic poets are a group of isolated individuals poetically searching for man, nature, and God. Similarly reductive is LaPorte’s sense of the Victorians’ perception of Catholicism as “the mirror reflection of the higher criticism” and theology that credulously abdicates the “right to question history sanctioned by the Church” (164). Both Romanticism and Catholicism come to signify for LaPorte through a mystifying and naive relationship to the Bible that is corrected by nineteenthcentury poets with a practical efficiency. This has the effect of characterizing LaPorte’s Victorians as brassy trivializers of Romanticism and religious tradition who exude their misgivings in impudent, if prosodically ingenious, compositions. Clough’s Dipsychus is thus considered “forbidding” but “tongue-in-cheek” (112); Browning’s poetic expression of his religion moderated by “skepticism” (188); and Eliot’s commitment to a “post-Christian poetry” tantamount to the occupation of a moral high ground (198). Barrett Browning is presented as more forthright still in her “ungracious caricature of the Wordsworthian lyric subject” (34), using a “belittl[ing]” and “mock[ing]” tone borrowed from Felicia Hemans. This makes Hemans an “ironic” interrogator of “Wordsworthian Romanticism” for...

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