The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate (review)
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Gregory Tate's investigation of the ways Victorian poets explored the embodied mind is a finely constructed analysis of the intersection of psychology and poetics. Moving chronologically from the late 1820s through the end of the 1870s, Tate traces the various ways Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Clough, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and the spasmodic poets fashioned the embodied mind. This study contributes to the field by more fully exploring the ways in which Victorian poets contemplated the mind's processes, physical sensations, and emotive effects.
Drawing from the work of Philip Davis on intellectual culture and Isobel Armstrong on poetic theory, Tate argues for the influence of associationist psychology on Victorian poetics—in terms of both content and form. His methodology includes close reading of selected works by the poets in question as well as consideration of the work of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers on associationist psychology, physiology, evolution, and poetics. Of particular interest to readers of VPR will be Tate's use of periodical poetry reviews from a range of journals, including the Athenaeum, Edinburgh Review, Examiner, London Quarterly Review, North British Review, Monthly Repository, and Westminster Review. While this is not a work devoted to periodical study, Tate does more than merely mine the periodical record. The first chapter analyzing Tennyson's and Browning's early works, in particular, uses contemporary periodical reviews to establish how both poets and reviewers drew from Romantic discourse on poetic feeling and early associationist psychology. [End Page 572]
Tate also demonstrates how these poets were influenced by the emerging science of psychology through careful attention to print history. In his later chapters on Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot, Tate uses the contents of these writers' libraries to support his claims about their use of psychological theory. This evidence is most compelling in the chapter on Browning's epic psychology in The Ring and the Book. Tate notes two physiological psychology books in the Brownings' collection—Julius Althaus's The Functions of the Brain (1884) and James John Garth Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connexion with Man (1851)—arguing that Browning "was aware of the tenets of physiological psychology" (167). While it is an argument of correlation, his later suggestion—that Browning also would have been familiar with James Hinton's two articles on psychology and the physical processes of the brain, published in the Cornhill in 1862, and later George Henry Lewes's "The Heart and the Brain," published in the Fortnightly Review in 1865—is supported by convincing biographical evidence. Browning was asked in March 1862 to edit the Cornhill, and he wrote to Isabella Blagden in August 1865 praising the first installment of Anthony Trollope's The Belton Estate, which appeared in the same issue as Lewes's article. The strength of this evidence adds weight to Tate's close reading of Browning's poem.
Overall, this work elegantly explores the intersection of nineteenth-century poetics and psychology.
Lindsy Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. She teaches a variety of courses on nineteenth-century British literature, with special attention to publication history, gender roles, and the conventions of serial fiction. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining how domestic serials functioned as part of the editorial voice of the nineteenth-century family literary magazine. She is co-director of the Periodical Poetry Index.
