The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry by Linda K. Hughes, and: Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics by Valentine Cunningham (review)

Unlike the debut monograph that looks hard and drills deep, books like these by two distinguished senior scholars place a known field in panoramic perspective. Such books ideally are works of use, not ornament, and their usefulness proceeds partly from individual expertise but chiefly from the authority with which the scholar, having faithfully absorbed the collective labor of a generation, expounds the fruits of that labor in a fresh, compelling synthesis. By that standard one of these books is a success, the other a flop. Before proceeding to illustrate—and somewhat modify—so melodramatic a verdict, it may be useful to say a neutral word about what the books have in common as hallmarks of our time.

Both Linda K. Hughes and Valentine Cunningham concede that Victorian poetry is a field whose heterogeneity and multivalence defy the rule of a single thesis or master narrative. Both unapologetically make a virtue of this concession by emphasizing Victorian poetry’s contextual promiscuity (with, for example, biography, current events, literary history, and the sister arts) and also the chameleon mutability with which poems migrated from manuscript to print, and then among print venues from newspaper to collected works. Both show an acute awareness of rhyme effects, while neither proves consistently reliable as a guide to metrical ones; both give pride of penultimate place to an extended consideration of Aurora Leigh (1856), the major Victorian poem of our climate. And both keep a weather eye peeled for that climate. Admitting that a poem risks “ceasing to matter” after “the cultural and theological forces that brought it into being” have disappeared (175), Hughes devotes her book to helping “readers today recuperate the dynamism, vibrancy, and liveliness that defined Victorian poetry in its own day” (258), while the “Now” in Cunningham’s title advertises the rapprochement between Victorian and (post)modern concerns that he energetically promotes. In either account the up-to-dateness of Victorian poems inheres in their resistance to decisive formulation, whereby radical ambiguity on the face of the text bespeaks in the contextual middle distance a temperamental indecision, a fissure in the cultural fabric, or both together. When books so very different converge—in a sense, repose—on the same place, that place starts to look like this generation’s hermeneutic ground zero for the study of things Victorian (or is it poetic, or literary?).

Books, withal, so very different. Where Cunningham hectors his reader, stockpiles his material, and above all indicates what he has to say in a whirlwind of deixis, Hughes sets out to demonstrate something, and she patiently earns her point. The leading idea is that the Victorians wrote industrial-strength poetry, struggling to hold its position, or else manufacture a new one, in a mass-cultural marketplace overwhelmingly mediated by print. Hughes traces corollaries across a range of manifestations: poetry’s mass circulation among cascading numbers of novelty-hungry readers; its systems-savvy alertness to contextual determinants that shaped lives as well as texts; and its entrepreneurial imperative to hybridize old genres and experiment with new formats. This angle of approach lets Hughes appreciate Oscar Wilde’s eye for organizing a page, Rudyard Kipling’s ear for steam-driving a meter, and the differing ways “My Last Duchess” (1842) and Maud (1855) play eye against ear in the configuration of poetic lines against lines of print. What she finds to say about texts as diverse as The Christian Year (1827), Poems and Ballads (1866), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), and The Dream of Gerontius (1865) resounds between micro and macro levels, bearing out the pungency of her admirably terse polemic in defense of those rhetorical dimensions which poetry shares, once it is...