The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION who was ever altered by a poem? —Byron, Letters Nineteenth-century critics expressed with cries of alarm what was for W. H. Auden by 1939 a mere statement of fact:“poetry makes nothing happen.”The lines that follow this statement in Auden’s famous poem, “In Memory of W. B.Yeats,” speak to a number of the concerns in this book: For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs. (36–39) What this study explores is the cultural background, the literary prehistory for what was by Auden’s day already cliché—the poet’s isolation, poetry’s inefficacy, its opposition to political economy, its self-creating and self-involved autonomy, and its association with strong emotion. From the retrospective of poetry’s marginalization in the twentieth century, many studies follow Auden’s lead and read canonical nineteenth-century poetry as always already ineffective, elitist, self-involved, as caught up in what Jerome McGann has termed “Romantic ideology”; however, as this book illustrates, the slow devolvement of poetry into the cliché of inefficacy was a gradual, uneven, and highly contested development in the period. Poetry did not, in other words, go quietly into high culture’s good night. This book focuses on three things associated with poetry in the Romantic and early Victorian period that complicate the attribution of high-cultural inefficacy to the poetic enterprise: popularity, politics, and pathology. Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron serve as the dialectical foci for such a study precisely because of their unprecedented popularity in the period, and, indeed, one of 1 2 THE PERVERSITY OF POETRY the topics I will seek to clarify is the relationship of Scott’s and Byron’s verse romances to the market and print technologies of their age. This book also argues that both Scott and Byron had an effect on the political fabric of the Romantic period, albeit an effect that was undercut by a medico-moral rhetoric of health and perversity not only applied to both poets but also invited by both poets in order to screen or figure their political messages. What is so interesting about these two fantastically popular poets, who were consistently and pervasively juxtaposed as the two opposing possibilities for the future of poetry, is that they not only spoke to an emergent mass market and influenced opposing political groups but also invited their own marginalization by playing into a medical rhetoric about poetical geniuses that would eventually ensure their dismissal by Victorian critics. Following Scott’s own lead, Romantic and Victorian critics continually represented Scott’s poetry as a panacea for a modern world overtaken by new principles of utilitarianism, capitalism, industrialism , and democracy. Following Byron’s lead, those same critics tended to represent Byron’s poetry as a disease in the heart of the social order or as a contagious pandemic leading to various pathological symptoms, particularly those arising from the sexual perversity of Byron’s body and corpus.Through such “treatment” of these exemplary poet figures, the figuration of poets in general was translated from the register of politics to that of medicine and sexuality. Alfred Lord Tennyson, who is the subject of the book’s Coda, represents a Victorian negotiation and sublation of the dialectical opposition represented by Scott and Byron. This book posits that the two positions figured for poetry in Scott and Byron are, in fact, strictly homologous: both serve, in the end, to push the poetic enterprise to the margins of the social body, be it as cure or as curse, thus opening the way for the eventual dominance of the realist novel; however, both of these fantasized possibilities for poetry obscure the fact that Scott and Byron not only facilitated the emergence of a mass market through the unprecedented dissemination of their work but also participated actively in the political struggles of their time period, much more so than is usually acknowledged : Scott through his counterrevolutionary opposition to radicalism and his orchestration of a new legitimating ideology of medievalism for George IV; Byron through his positing of a principle of justice and revolutionary opposition in his poetry, a principle that inspired a host of disparate radical groups. The shift to a rhetoric of health served, one might say, to cure Romantic poetry of its earlier association with both the mass market and revolutionary politics, leaving us...