Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism by Christopher M. Keirstead (review)

The scholarly focus on the formation of nation states which followed on books such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) has recently turned toward interest in transnational relations, including Britain’s relations with its European neighbors. Thus, for instance, Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (2002) explores fiction’s contribution to a liminal “Channel zone” of literary exchange between Britain and France (2), while Roberto M. Dainotto’s Europe [in Theory] (2007) invokes Edward Said’s opposition between East and West to posit a supplementary tension between Northern and Southern Europe. Engaging with this field from the perspective of poetics, Christopher M. Keirstead’s Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism expands on the precedents of Matthew Reynolds in The Realms of Verse, 1830–1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (2001) and Herbert F. Tucker in Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008).

The “challenge” of his title, informed by theories of “rooted cosmopolitanism” (5), involves the twofold need to “negotiate national identities and aesthetic traditions within a larger European cultural matrix” while cultivating “an impulse of self-criticism” that “guarded against overinvestment in notions of progress—and overindulgence in poetry’s capacity to effect political and cultural change” (4). Keirstead’s faith in Victorian poetry’s special aptitude for meeting this challenge stems from English poets’ longstanding immersion in alternative literatures, ancient and modern; from the Romantic poets’ view of poetry as “an archetypal, universal language”; and from Matthew Arnold’s assertion of “the poet’s prerogative ‘to appeal to the great primary human affections’” (8). Poetry is thus a discourse especially suited to articulating an imaginary Europe, an “ever-impending Europe of the future” still evolving (or perhaps devolving) today (3).

Impressive in its scope and flexibility, Keirstead’s project discusses seven major Victorian poets, engaging such challenging hybrids as Arthur Hugh Clough’s epistolary satire in hexameters, Amours de Voyage (1858) and William Morris’s Norse saga, Sigurd the Volsung (1876). This range provides ample opportunity for Keirstead to demonstrate his formidable erudition. While he uses the analogy of an atlas to position readers as “critical geographers charting the multiple courses of Victorian poetry” (2), he adopts a fresh historical lens to focus the thematic and rhetorical border-crossing mapped in each chapter. Thus, for instance, the evolution of a transcontinental postal system forms the backdrop to Clough’s literal and fictional correspondence with friends and family during the Roman Republic’s fall in the summer of 1849. Likewise, the littoral culture of coastal bathing in Normandy informs the failed figurative border-crossing of suicide Léonce Miranda, and its counterpart, the effective Anglo-French “cross-dwelling” of the poet’s friend, Joseph Milsand, in Robert Browning’s Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) (105).

Keirstead is at his strongest when he illustrates poetry’s special capacity to negotiate between individual, national, and international interests. Fine examples include his admirable reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Mother and Poet” (1862) where the grand ideal of Italian unification is weighed against bitter material costs to individuals. An even more ambitious instance can be found in his penultimate chapter, “Europe in Perspective: The Dynasts,” where he offers an intriguing interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s formidable epic as “a critical reevaluation of Napoleon’s efforts to spear-head the nineteenth century’s first movement toward pan-Europeanism” (187). A deft concluding retrospective simultaneously reminds us of the prospective visions of confederated Europe offered earlier through Arnold and Barrett Browning. He demonstrates poetry’s vitalization of abstractions through the use of voice and personification to figure the Spirits who articulate all “the different orientations toward God that Hardy entertained over the course of his literary career” (186). Here too Keirstead illustrates how collaboration founders when political and economic differences are not respected and the defining characteristics of dynasties harden into...