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  • Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins by Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol
  • James Najarian (bio)
Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins, by Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol; pp. 211. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, £55.00, $99.95.

Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol’s book on Keatsian luxury and its heirs engagingly reexamines a poetic genealogy that scholars have investigated for some time. Her wonderfully full work is readable and always interesting; there is no jargon, even when the author is responding to critics whose own prose is larded with it. Her technique relies heavily on close reading—on the audial as well as the linguistic level. She constantly [End Page 561] attends, as one should in a manuscript in part about the woven characteristics of lusciousness, to the interplay of sounds and the poetic line. Tontiplaphol has larger cultural arguments, but her real subject throughout the work is the construction of textuality, from John Keats (influenced in part by William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt) through Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Tontiplaphol is intent on showing the ways in which Tennyson and Hopkins transform Keatsian enclosures for their own purposes. She explicates the elements common to Keats and the later poets—images of textuality, weaving as a poetic technique, the linguistic enclosure, and the list—and shows the ways in which these elements are repeated, manipulated, and even (in Tennyson) broken up. Tontiplaphol argues that Keats takes the luxurious spaces of a poem like Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816) and shrinks them into circumscribed, cozy bowers. During the course of his brief career, Keats’s work “reflect[s] a developing understanding of woven form” (53)—from the bowers imperfectly stitched together in the episodic Endymion (1818) through the perfected weaving of The Eve of St Agnes (1820) and “To Autumn” (1820). Tontiplaphol offers an excellent reading of Lamia (1820) that attends to the parts of the poem and the effect of the poem as a whole. It makes rapid sense of a sensuousness that is too often seen as simply delightful.

Tontiplaphol argues that while Tennyson inherits Keats’s penchant for lush landscapes and catalogues, he constructs his bowers differently: “Whereas Keats weaves strings of material pleasures into a dense poetic damask, Tennyson knits his sensory catalogues into a kind of poetic lace, integral but full of holes” (84). She traces this distinctive brand of materiality in In Memoriam (1850), Maud (1855), and Idylls of the King (1859–85). I especially admire the complexity and completeness of her reading of Idylls; she makes aesthetic sense of a (very) long poem, offering us at once linguistic and ideological unity and ranging over the poem with complete control.

I was not quite persuaded by Tontiplaphol’s historical argument linking industrial consumer culture and materiality in the works of Keats and Tennyson. Tontiplaphol presents depictions of early and mid-nineteenth-century shops and department stores, but those scenes are not always connected securely to the poems under discussion. What seems to be missing here is the literary-historical part of history—with the result that I am not sure how we get from shopping to Endymion (for instance). A look at nineteenth-century reactions to both Keats and Tennyson would provide ample illustrations of a connection. So would more attention to Hunt and Keats in Hunt’s circle. Though I was glad to see Ayumi Mizukoshi’s Keats, Hunt, and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (2001) cited, Hunt has recently come under many other critical eyes, eyes that see his materialism and emphasis on the decorative as ideological, anti-aristocratic preoccupations rather than as mere excrescences—I’d look at the essays in Nicholas Roe’s Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (2003).

The cultural argument is at its strongest in the book’s best chapter, that on Hopkins. Tontiplaphol reveals the roles played by William Morris and Hopkins’s tutor Walter Pater in bringing Hopkins to understand materiality. The connection she makes between industrial production and poetry is more convincing in her work on Hopkins, with his attachment to wild landscapes and concern with the individual in society. She regards his “inscape” as a...

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