Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (review)

It would be tempting to say that Kirstie Blair's excellent book is structured like a human heart. One side of your heart, remember, pumps blood to the lungs; the other side then sends the newly oxygenated blood to nourish the rest of your body. In the same way, Blair's opening two chapters enrich our understanding of the language of the heart in Victorian England: the first details Victorian theories of heart disease, the second describes the connections drawn by both doctors and metrical theorists between pulses and poetic rhythms. The next two chapters then apply this newly enriched discourse to readings of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Matthew Arnold.

But to compare the book's opening chapters even to the two sides of a single heart (an association reinforced by the crimson color and anatomical illustration of the dust jacket) is to belie how truly continuous and integrated they are. The danger of studies such as this one is that they can become bifurcated: often they describe a scientific or cultural phenomenon and a contemporaneous literary development, but then struggle to connect them convincingly (is the relationship causal, or just intriguingly parallel?). Blair's study negotiates this challenge successfully, because she shows how perfectly continuous the medical and poetic discourses were in this period—specifically because the medical knowledge was so fuzzy. Blair explains that the early nineteenth century did see some cardiological developments of lasting value, such as the invention of the stethoscope in 1819. But most scientific writing on the subject of the heart was intended as much for a popular as for a professional audience, and it gave equal weight to "organic" complaints (actual heart disease) and "sympathetic" ones. According to the best medical opinion, in other words, you were just as likely to suffer cardiological symptoms from loving, grieving, or reading and writing passionate poetry as from a congenitally defective heart. In consequence, as Blair shrewdly points out, when a passionate character in a Victorian poem or novel dies of heart disease, it is impossible to know whether this is due to dramatic irony or to medical causality; the two are virtually indistinguishable.

Similarly, Blair's first four chapters, despite the differences in their proclaimed subjects, all address cultural and poetic discourses of the heart in roughly equal measure. The first two, for instance, illustrate the medical theories they discuss with brilliant readings of contemporary poems, both obscure and familiar. (Blair is a wonderful close-reader of poetry, all the more admirable in that her analyses are never merely set-piece tours de force: each verbal and rhythmic detail she observes is made to contribute directly to her argument.) The chapters on Barrett Browning and Arnold, meanwhile, although they culminate in examinations of Aurora Leigh (1857) and Empedocles on Etna (1852), do not really offer new readings of either of those poems but use them to illustrate cultural developments. The Barrett Browning chapter concerns the gendering of the heart in Victorian discourse; it counters Angela Leighton's influential reading of a feminine heart that women poets increasingly eschewed by positing a more complexly gendered and politicized heart. (Blair's most telling example here is not Aurora Leigh but Casa Guidi Windows [1851].) The chapter on Arnold chiefly describes Victorian religious controversy, in which all parties, for different reasons, both invoked and strenuously renounced the language of the heart. Again, the crucial text seems not to be the one with which the chapter concludes (Empedocles) but a smaller work, "The Buried Life" (1852). Blair offers a brief but compelling new account of how in this lyric Arnold makes it clear that his governing metaphor refers to the physical heart and circulation of the blood yet also avoids directly invoking such a controversial image.

The culminating chapter concerns Alfred Tennyson, who is said to have "reflected upon and to some extent influenced all the discourses already discussed. . . . The poetics of the heart...