Poetics en Passant: Redefining the Relationship between Victorian and Modern Poetry (review)

How might we practice a truly comparative poetics in the age of cultural studies? With the overwhelming amount of new information available in searchable archives, the rise of historical poetics, and the attention paid to the materiality and circulation of texts, some worry that the practice of close reading, so prized for so long, is not only incompatible with so-called distant reading, but also outdated and ahistorical. With so many new considerations and disciplines challenging conventional approaches to literature, moreover, it can be difficult to give a full, historically aware, and formally rigorous account of a single poet within his or her national tradition, let alone two poets in two national traditions at the same time. Anne Jamison shows us how. In her important new book Poetics en Passant: Redefining the Relationship between Victorian and Modern Poetry Jamison expertly reads Charles Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti to show that the categories “Victorian” and “Modern” make little to no chronological sense. A true comparatist, Jamison argues that the two contemporaries—one considered the first modern and the other considered an always-outdated Victorian poetess—both rebel against (and alter) literary convention through what she calls “shock” and “stealth,” or a poetics of transgression (7). Despite a resurgent interest in transatlantic poetics, Jamison points out that “British culture’s translinguistic relationships with relatively equal European nations have received comparatively little attention” (4). She takes strident, intense, and often entertaining steps toward righting that wrong. With an awareness of many competing traditions and theoretical and historical approaches including but not limited to Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s poetics as inherently modern, nineteenth-century print culture, the politics and poetics of gender, poetess poetry and sentimental verse, pastiche, historical prosody, and translation and appropriation, Poetics en Passant demonstrates that the idea of a transgressive “cross-Channel” poetics deserves sustained study (6).

Jamison is a first-rate translator—all of the stunning Baudelaire translations are hers—and her writing is as clear and engaging as her arguments are complicated. She is true to her overarching argument throughout: both Baudelaire and Rossetti “rely heavily on the premise and practice of linguistic duplicity[,] . . . on the ability of language to define norms and expectations and simultaneously—or often in quick succession, on second glance—to undermine them. Both models [shock and stealth] . . . propose modes of reading transgressively and encode ‘straight’ reading practices as foils to accentuate or occult their own transgressive potential” (16–17). For instance, in discussing the “shock” mode of each poet she explains that “textual interpenetration embodies and enacts the violent sexual, physical, and social interpenetrations of the narrative level through an exploitation of class-charged and (even more powerfully for Rossetti) gender-charged formal and lexical material” (17–18). These broad argumentative moves seem ambitious and a bit abstract in the introduction, but her careful readings in the six chapters that follow (three on Baudelaire, three on Rossetti) illuminate that this book is meant to revise our understanding not only of these two poets or the periods with which they are associated, but also of the ways that we might approach poetic texts tout court.

Setting up the “uncertain position” and “importance” of gender, power, cross-cultural fertilization, coercion, and violence early in the first chapter, Jamison argues that Baudelaire’s turn to prose poems allowed him to escape the strictures of French prosody while importing and translating conceptions of English prosody (31). My curiosity was piqued here, but it is not until the third chapter that Jamison reveals the extent to which Baudelaire was steeped in (and obsessed by) Anglophone writing, particularly the theories of Edgar Allan Poe. Though the second chapter’s analysis of Baudelaire’s engagement with the French press is informative and archivally interesting, I was impatient to know more about Baudelaire’s metrical interventions (a promise Jamison makes in the introduction, when she states, comparing Baudelaire to Rossetti, that “the...