Women Poets

Publications in 2012 on women's poets (excluding Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who are addressed in other Year's Work reviews) continue to cement the importance of women's poetry to Victorian literature. In particular, new book-length studies underline the complexity and sophistication of the engagement of women's poetry with religion and with the lyric form. Two major new studies on prosody and on recitation incorporate important material on women poets, and other articles and chapters on individual poets continue to enrich and deepen the field of Victorian women's poetry.

Catherine Robson's fascinating, intelligent, and lively new monograph Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), a major new study on the readers of nineteenth-century poetry, features an extended discussion of Felicia Hemans. Eschewing analysis of the poets and poetry in favor of the text's consumers (although there are some sharp close readings nonetheless), Heart Beats uncovers the history of the pedagogical afterlife of three popular poems, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca," and Charles Wolfe's "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." Despite the limited range of poems, the book is wide and capacious in its scope, beginning with a first section that examines the history of poetry in nineteenth- and twentieth-century elementary schools in Britain and America, and the relation between widespread recitation practises and nineteenth-century debates about prosody. The argument examines how meter is internalized within the body of the anxious and excited child, as he or she is compelled to recite a poem in the schoolroom. The analysis is carefully based on scrupulous cultural and historical research into a wide array of sources, including educational acts and commission reports, school anthologies, manuals for teachers, school report cards, and individual recollections. But the methodology also involves a degree of speculation, most strikingly exemplified by the introductory paragraphs to Part 1, in which the experiences of two school children in Wisconsin and West Riding are imaginatively re-created and juxtaposed. Robson explicitly acknowledges the practice of conjecture as a way "to create a more expansive discussion of some the unquestionably estimable benefits of memorized poetry than straightforward documentation would seem to allow" (p. 12). As compelling and convincing as thus approach is, the speculation nonetheless sits uncomfortably with the more conventional approaches of cultural, educational, sociological, and reception history. And yet, the uneasy pairing of historicism and speculation that Robson exploits makes for some of the best moments in the study. This approach so self-consciously adopted, and so eloquently delivered, seems to strike at the heart of what most Victorian scholars do, and to ask us to question the division between academic critique and biographical conjecture. I am not sure that this provocative approach is entirely successful, but the outcome nonetheless is compelling and audacious, and hopefully it will spark continued debate about our practices as Victorianists.

The chapter on Felicia Hemans' "Casabianca" will interest scholars of women's poetry the most. A re-working and expansion of Robson's much-cited article on the poem in PMLA (120 [2005]: 148-162), this chapter argues that Hemans' popular poem exemplifies the intimate connection between meter and the body of the reciting child. The pedagogical practice that required children to memorize and recite poems that have a pronounced metrical regularity, Robson argues, also re-shapes the poem's metrical afterlife. "Casabianca," "the nation's favourite performance piece," is paired with Elizabeth Bishop's parody to tease out the "uncanny alliance" between the theme of Hemans' poem and British pedagogical practices of recitation. In a closely argued, sophisticated, and witty reading, the metrical pulse of "Casabianca" is seen to be performed and interiorized by the "mesmeric state of the reciter," a union between the poem's beat and the reciter's heart beat that, Robson speculates, Hemans may have anticipated.

The popularity of "Casabianca" as a performance piece illustrates that "when an era's people learned poetry by heart . . . , their relationship to measured language—and especially to regular meter—carried a distinct, corporal difference from...