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  • The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870 by Gregory Tate
  • Vanessa L. Ryan (bio)
The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870, by Gregory Tate; pp. 201. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, £67.00, $115.00.

Gregory Tate opens his absorbing and careful study, The Poet’s Mind, with the bold claim that one of the most influential poetic modes in Victorian Britain was “the poetry of psychological analysis,” namely, poetry that studies the workings of the mind (3). Victorian poets—including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, and even George Eliot—challenged a longstanding separation of poetry and psychology that Tate traces to the Romantic period. Where William Wordsworth had privileged the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” Victorian poets saw not just the unmediated expression of emotion, but also the analysis of thought as legitimately belonging to the domain of poetry (qtd. in Tate 13). Tate demonstrates that this shift in poetic theory and practice was intimately connected with the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century.

Tate’s fine-grained study thus argues that Victorian poetry puts into question a series of oppositions between poetry and science, feeling and thought, and expression and analysis. The strength of The Poet’s Mind is its productive complication of the more straightforward narrative that Victorian poetry increasingly privileged science, thought, and analysis. Rather, these poets worked closely with evolving psychological theories of the period, which questioned any clear separation between analysis and feeling, between metaphysical and material versions of interiority, and between mind and body—thus showing each to be complexly enmeshed in a new account of the embodied mind. Tate aims to correct a tendency in today’s criticism, which often unwittingly recreates the nineteenth-century view of a separation between poetry and psychology, “reinforcing divisions, between thought and feeling or between mind and body” (185). His book thus [End Page 336] serves as a valuable addition to existing scholarship on the importance of Victorian psychology, crucially adding a consideration of poets as well as novelists.

The Poet’s Mind offers an intriguing account of the complex understanding of the concepts of mind, brain, and soul, and thought, feeling, and emotion in the Victorian period. Tate focuses especially on the associationist psychology of the time (including works by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, and their precursor David Hartley), which maintained that thoughts move by association continuously from one thought to the next. Following Rick Rylance’s important identification of Victorian psychology with “dynamic, process-based conceptions” of the mind, Tate highlights the fundamentally dynamic nature of mind in Victorian poetry (qtd. in Tate 7). He depicts each of his main authors as continually debating the relationship between the spiritual and the material, often unwilling to give up the concept of a unified metaphysical soul. Throughout the study, Tate shows how poetry—especially by means of its formal features—can function as an exploratory and epistemological tool.

The book is structured chronologically, studying the poetry of the mind from the late 1820s to the end of the 1870s. While Tate focuses each chapter largely on one or two authors, his treatment of these authors covers the whole span of their careers. A number of poets are thus considered more than once, with both Tennyson and Browning, subjects of the first chapter, returning in later chapters, as Tate moves from their early poetry to their later output. The effect is a compelling account of the dynamic, changing views of these writers as they grapple with the evolving Victorian debates about psychology.

In his first chapter, “Tennyson, Browning, and the Poetry of Reflection,” Tate shows how both writers rework Romantic distinctions, establishing in their early poetry a new poetics of introspective analysis that serves as a foundation for the poetry that follows. He then turns in his second chapter, “Clough, Arnold, and the Dialogue of the Mind,” to the contentious nature of the place of mind in poetry at mid-century. Returning to Tennyson, this time to In Memoriam (1850) and Maud (1855), Tate’s third chapter, “Tennyson’s Unquiet Brain,” traces the poet’s...

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