Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

"All the new thinking is about loss," writes Robert Hass in "Meditation at Lagunitas." Much recent work in Victorian studies seems evidence for such a claim, indexed by a marked increase in sightings of Edward FitzGerald. Indeed, two of this year's most interesting books on Victorian poetry proper—Erik Gray's The Poetry of Indifference and David Riede's Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry—turn, in a gesture of culmination, to FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát. For both studies, that poem and its author epitomize an emotional register or attitude toward life and art that is strongly correlated with the Victorian zeitgeist: a post-Wordsworthianism that Gray identifies as "indifference" and Riede as "melancholy." Both terms acknowledge some kind of absence as a predicate; Gray is interested in poems that respond with ultimately consoling gestures of alienation and disregard, while Riede focuses on Victorian poetry as a series of sorrowful allegories that only increase the sense of split or rupture from the Romantic inner self (but meanwhile become powerful art in their own terms). In addition, John D. Rosenberg's Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature offers a synoptic, magisterial perspective on the persistently backward-looking cast of the Victorian imagination, at once nostalgic and anxious. Taken together, these books offer a particularly rich evocation of Victorian modalities of loss.

The Poetry of Indifference divides its attention between second-generation Romantic and Victorian poets, with full chapters on Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes," Byron's Don Juan, Tennyson's In Memoriam, and FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, and with additional commentary on Browning, Swinburne, Housman, and Christina Rossetti. Gray's aim is not to provide a progressive literary-historical narrative, but rather to explore particularly interesting cases wherein poems display a kind of carelessness or coolness that troubles readerly expectations. Wordsworth provides a point of departure: his poetry "is haunted by the possibility of indifference" (p. 20), yet it "depends too much on sympathy and effort" to maintain that posture (p. 26). Poets in his wake were less restrained, as Gray demonstrates in a series of close readings at once elegant, witty, and extraordinarily telling. He argues that Keats uses epistolary strategies—most notably, rapid and insensitive changes of subject—in telling the story of Porphyro and Madeline, with its famously anticlimactic conclusion. Gray then invokes tourism to explain the unsettling indifference that Don Juan engenders in its readers: mobility produces obliviousness, a phenomenon reflected in the style and plot of Byron's epic and transmitted to the audience thereby. In Memoriam is shown to be structured by Tennyson's rejection of poetic aspirations and a "refusal to advance" (p. 92), an aspect of the poem modeled by its view of Christmas as a time of inescapable nostalgia and disappointment. Finally, of the Rubáiyát, Gray writes, "The poem expends most of its energy trying to avoid notice and to accomplish nothing" (p. 93) and indeed "to sink immediately . . . into oblivion" (p. 101). He relates this to FitzGerald's own reticence and the poem's publication and reception history, including the ways his most famous poem has been misremembered. A chapter on Browning as FitzGerald's opposite—as a poet devoted to the energetic struggle after meaning—concludes the book, along with a brief, deft epilogue that looks towards Modernism via the "anaesthetic" strain in later poetry and finds a stopping-point in Frost. This provocative, deeply human book demonstrates that poetry has resources to illuminate not only our passionate moments, but what is perhaps more necessary, "the indifferent majority of life" (p. 140).

David Riede's book on allegory and melancholy also locates a brand of ambivalence at the core of Victorian poetry, yet here its evidence lies not in indifference but in mournful, morbid struggles. Wordsworth's "deep power of joy" allowed him "to see into the life of things," but for the generations that followed, Riede argues, "it became the burden of the melancholy imagination to see into the death of things" (p. 20), as the...