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Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003) 642-645



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The Two Voices

John M. Picker


I am writing this on 9/11/02, an odd time to be speculating on "Whither Victorian poetry?" or, for that matter, whither anything. But to the extent that academic discussions of Victorian poetry, or any poetry, or any art at all, simultaneously can offer an antidote for and escape from international terror on the one hand and the follies of the Bush administration on the other, there is both value and delusion in having them. An expression of what kind of future those "at the beginning of their careers" would envision for the study of Victorian poetry needs to begin with an honest qualification of the limited, one might even say trivial, value of such work to the Future with a capital F, that is, the future of the planet and the secure future of its inhabitants. The infrequent acknowledgement of this by literary critics, or the insistence on claiming for institutional study of literature a redeeming or humanizing quality that can, student by student, change the world, is premised on the failure to distinguish between the effect that writing actually has in the world before and apart from college (particularly for those who never attend it), and the work it is made to do as "literature" in the university classroom and system, where it appears packaged and pre-analyzed for student consumption. We can count the number of courses in which Victorian poetry is assigned to students and the number of textbooks sold for those courses; but we can not quantify the readers, whoever and wherever they may be, encountering Victorian poetry, of whatever kind, in whatever form, in unsystematic ways that escape the controlling oversight of a professor or instructor. Anyone who teaches literature in such a system needs, if they are to be honest with themselves, each other, and their students, to be of two minds about what it is they teach and why they teach it.

It is therefore possible, and likely, inevitable, to be at once excited and disillusioned about the future directions of scholarly work on Victorian poetry. Excited because it is clear that there are new kinds of directions such work can and likely will take, and that there are many people to [End Page 642] do it; disillusioned because it is a safe bet that fewer and fewer students will enroll in Victorian poetry courses, that (if the observations of the MLA President in his recent letter to members are any indication) fewer and fewer monographs will be published on it, and that, as the distance between the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries continues to grow, the period itself will seem to newcomers, and perhaps even some old-timers, ever more remote, mystifying, or merely quaint, and not necessarily be able to sustain its professional base, in terms of dedicated faculty positions and funding, which by all accounts are already diminishing.

All this is cause for alarm, of course—or is it? Granted, this may not bode well for the academic study of Victorian poetry. But it seems presumptuous to think that there is no life for Victorian poetry outside or apart from its scholarly digestion and regurgitation in critical edition after edition and monograph after monograph—that indeed there may even be more life for it possible elsewhere, or by other means. There is hope for a future life for Victorian poetry, but it does not, and cannot, only reside in yesterday's institutional structures of tenure-track lines, arcane dissertations, and dutiful lectures to hordes of survey students. I am thinking here not only of the numerous popular movements that have cropped up online and in reading clubs (like Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project at http://www.favoritepoem.org); I have more in mind those elusive non-quantifiable readers I mentioned above, who do not, or cannot, depend on the knowledgeable—or is it patronizing?—guidance of qualified literature providers to help them manage, mulch, and mow the field of Victorian poetry. To the question, "Will Victorian poetry continue to be...

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