Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 (review)

This is an impeccable study. Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 was a book waiting to be written, and Stephanie Kuduk Weiner has done full justice to her theme. She has identified and analysed a republican tradition of poetry and poetics in the long nineteenth century with wonderful critical succinctness and historical sense.

Weiner's narrative unhesitatingly crosses the boundaries of print culture, boldly juxtaposing plebeian texts and poetry that have become part of an elite tradition. The study is shaped by the inflections of radical poetry at different historical moments—for instance, the collapse of mass pro-reform energies in the 1820s and the growing alliance of radical-liberal critique in the 1850s. She begins by reading William Blake's Songs of Experience (1794) alongside the anonymous "New Songs" published in the republican periodical, Politics for the People; goes on to place the aesthetic debates of the imprisoned "seditious" editors of the Newgate Magazine and their contributors against P. B. Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1821); moves to the Chartist poetry of Thomas Cooper and William James Linton; and then demonstrates the interpenetration of radical and elite writing in the work of Walter Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough. Finally, the pervasive presence of republican politics in middle-class poetry (Algernon Swinburne, George Meredith) as well as in the texts of the free-thinking press (James Thomson) represents the triumph of republican culture and at the same time produces its dispersal. Republican poetry lost its identity as it was assimilated into broader movements and forms.

This analysis follows a convincing historiography of the changing moments of republican culture and its programme through the century: from what one might term the agonistic satires of the 1790s, through Chartism's lyrics of labour (savagely repressive periods when you could be imprisoned for republican beliefs), through Landor's analytics, to the moment of the 1860s when free-thinking readings of culture battled with Arnoldian definitions and, at least for the moment, won. Weiner defines republican beliefs as a constellation of critiques of arbitrary power, anti-priest, anti-king, egalitarian, pro-suffrage and democratic, passional in its critique of working-class suffering, increasingly internationalist and pro-Italian, potentially contradictory in its understanding of the collective alongside a belief in individual fulfilment, but generally holding these elements together. She thinks of this constellation as a response to state and economic violence but sequesters republican programmes from socialism, believing that a concern with socialism has masked the increasingly central presence of republican values in British society. To the extent that the atheist Charles Bradlaugh and the socialist H. M. Hyndman debated publicly in the later century, she is right. But arguably that strength was produced by the crossing of socialism, with its critique of capital, and republicanism, stemming from hatred of ancient regime power. Friedrich Engels, for instance, wrote thirty-five pieces for the Northern Star, the Chartist and republican paper, between 1843 and 1849.

Her criteria for the republican poet are fairly strict: she writes of those activist poets who have clear affiliations with republican movements, groups, publications, or polemic. Except for Swinburne these writers, plebeian or elite, mostly share a belief in and theorised a rhetoric of transparency and demystification. One of Weiner's tasks is to unfold the ideological and aesthetic motives for this preference at different times, as well as the possibilities and limits of the plain style itself. Here her readings are often superb. The parody of "God save the King"—one of the "New Songs" that ruthlessly demonstrates how the national anthem "recasts misery as patriotism" (23), and defiantly establishes singing as a form of civic liberty and a counter-patriotic sphere of collective action—is beautifully analysed. Her account of Linton's definitional procedures in "Faith," where semantic purity is given both clarity and complexity by the way rhyme and metre pull apart and expose the theme of connection that the poem is exploring, is arresting. She treats plebeian...