Whither, Whether, Woolf: Victorian Poetry and A Room of One's Own

This is not, of course, the first time the question "Whither Victorian Poetry?" has been posed. In its lovely, archaic locution, it hearkens back to the Victorian poets themselves, and surely they had the keenest sense of how confusing they might be to posterity. But one of the finest meditations on this question is that of a modernist, Virginia Woolf, in the opening pages of A Room of One's Own (1929). Woolf begins her survey of British literary history by wondering whatever happened to Victorian poetry, questioning why it cannot be written, or possibly even read—at least with unalloyed pleasure—any longer. My own response to the question posed by this special issue of Victorian Poetry follows Woolf's turning footsteps, as she asks where this literature went, as well as whether we can or would want to get it back. Woolf suggests ways in which this body of work might continue to hold not only delights but also urgent uses for later readers, and in doing so she imagines a future for Victorian poetry that the poets themselves might have doubted.

"Whither Victorian Poetry?" is essentially the question Virginia Woolf asks as the luncheon at the Oxbridge male college draws to a close. Happening to look out the window and see a Manx cat she concludes, "Something seemed lacking, something seemed missing" in that now-famous feline, and still more in the conversation around her. Woolf tells us she "listened with all my ears," and what she comes to hear is what she almost cannot hear: "a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves." Seeking to "set that humming noise to words," she opens a book magically to hand by the window-seat and "turned casually enough to Tennyson." Here is the sequence of poems and questions that follows:

There has fallen a splendid tear
   From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
   She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near";
   And the white rose weeps, "She is late":
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear";
   And the lily whispers, "I wait."

Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?

My heart is like a singing bird
   Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
   Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
   That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
   Because my love is come to me.

Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war? ¹

That the turn to Tennyson is made "casually enough" is not unconvincing on its face, given the ubiquity of this poet's work. Woolf's 1927 To The Lighthouse had recently portrayed the tenacity of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," already long a memorization exercise for schoolchildren in Britain and its colonies, learned by rote if not always by heart. In the novel, we recall, Tennyson's lines stick in the mind of the father, and in the craw of his children.

As with all the turns, however, that Woolf takes that day in Oxbridge, wending her way in this direction and that among the grounds, chapels, and libraries of the male colleges, this turn to Tennyson is neither casual nor accidental. It follows, rather, with inexorable logic the luncheon that has just preceded this moment of reading in the window-seat. In looking first at the "Come into the Garden, Maud" passage from the end of Part One of Maud, and then at Christina Rossetti's "My Heart is Like a Singing Bird," Woolf points us, in one of the essay's longest sequences of literary quotation, toward what are...