The Realms of Verse: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (review)

That's Realms of Verse, not Reams, don't worry—though among the many virtues of this broad-minded, sure-handed book is the extent of ground it commands. Matthew Reynolds provides substantial new readings of the major long poems of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, in welcome technical detail and in persuasive political context. Giving "politics" a narrower construction than prevails to his scholarly left, Reynolds conceives the topic in relation to regimes, legislation, and how these changed, in Britain and also on the Continent, especially Italy. It was in response to questions of political governance, he shows, that the High Victorian poets (anything but the alien-visionary escapists they are still mistaken for) did their most important writing.

Reynolds evaluates that writing by a criterion of double complexity. At the level of ideology the poets he admires took their politics seriously enough to be chastened by, even resistant to, their own motivating commitments: "the relationship between individuals and the larger political whole [...] is itself complicated and made significant" (48). That such attitudinal complexity demanded a commensurate richness of formal expression it's the great merit of this book to demonstrate, in readings that move with tact and penetration across the "enquiring and expansive textures" (18) of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Aurora Leigh (1856), A. H. Clough's Bothie (1848) and Amours de Voyage (1858), Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69), Alfred Tennyson's Princess (1847) and Idylls of the King (1842-85), and selected lyrics by each poet as well.

This flexibly maintained premise yields strong interpretations of all the texts Reynolds takes up, including the best treatment yet of Casa Guidi Windows. The Realms of Verse proves remarkably fertile in ideas about poetry, nationalism, and the various Victorian relations between the two, ideas that the scope of this review will let me merely sample. In a century when writers from G. W. F. Hegel to Jacob Burckhardt conceived the state as a work of art, and when Samuel Taylor Coleridge discussed the British national constitution in the same organicist terms he had first honed on poetics, we should not be surprised by (though we have too little noted) the congruence between poets' aesthetic and political profiles: smooth Tennyson and disjunctive Browning, E.B.B. the enthusiast and dubious Clough, prophet of nothing. Readers of this journal will be aware how often fictional plots made marital union trope the imagined community of the nation, but for this familiar conjugation Reynolds gives us new eyes. He fans Victorian conceptions of marriage out into a spectrum embracing the free contract advocated by the Brownings, the hierogamy that undergirds and then saps Tennyson's Camelot, and in Clough a dozen diamond points of hesitation over espousing either a liberal or a sacral model of union.

Reynolds illuminates the quintessential progressivism whereby, when the formerly "othered" Italia of the 1840s got adopted a decade later as Britannia's kid sister instead—charming, unreliable, intrinsically "poetic"—the poets who championed her cause had to tread a fancy measure in order to retain credibility. Appreciating such niceties does not hamper the book's larger understanding that poetry, when it came to the literary expression of nineteenth-century politics, enjoyed distinct advantages. If on balance Tennyson articulated the condition of England better than a flat-out apologist like the historian E. A. Freeman, that may be because the distancing effect of verse equipped poetry better than prose to foster the longue-durée idea of continuity on which modern nationalism depends. Meanwhile Clough, from the skeptic side, deployed the overtness of poetry's resources to expose high-sounding political sentiment to deflation from within. One learns from this book how likely it is that "right" and "wrong" in Barrett Browning indicate political justice...