The Columbia History of British Poetry (108 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 426
Bible's account of the total time span of the earth's existence and humanity's relatively brief history, and the theory of evolution, speculated upon for decades and conclusively argued in Darwin's 1859
Origin of Species
, utterly disproved the biblical accounts of God's creation of mankind. In addition, evidences from the "higher criticism' of the Bible were proving more and more emphatically that the Bible was not the direct word of God, but rather a collection of diverse texts from diverse cultures. Further, and very simply, in an increasingly empirical age, fewer people were willing to believe in the supernatural.
Religious uncertainty was one source of seeming intellectual anarchy, of what Matthew Arnold saw as a confused "multitudinousness" in modern intellectual fife, which rendered poetry impossible. It was not, however, the only source of multitudinousness, nor the only reason for the perceived necessity of a new unifying discourse. Another was the growth of the multitudes themselves. During the course of the nineteenth century the population of England and Wales quadrupled, from fewer than nine million in 1801 to over forty million in 1901. One of the first problems any poet needed to consider was his or her relation to this burgeoning multitude, and the problem was compounded by the changing character of the population in an increasingly industrialized and urban society. The transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, along with a gradual spread of democratic government, profoundly changed the class structure, as wealth and, eventually, power shifted from the landed aristocracy to the expanding middle classes.
Victorian poetry, for the most part, was very much a middle-class discourse, with not infrequent leanings toward the traditionally conservative values of England's immemorially agrarian traditions. Although poetry's theoretical representation of universal truths by transcendence of such mundane considerations as social position had the effect of marginalizing regional, working-class, and women's poetry, in practice the "teachings" of the major poets inevitably represented their own middle-class culture. Indeed, poetry became, for Arnold and others, a hoped-for means of universalizing middle-class values, and especially of extending them to the lower classesthe majority of the British population, which was becoming increasingly restive and influential with the gradual spread of democracy.
Such hopes for poetry, of course, were doomed to disappointment. As both the population and the literacy rates increased, and as a popular press and commodity culture grew, serious poets became increasing-
 
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ly alienated from the popular culture that developed to serve the literate but unintellectual masses, and the gulf widened between "high" and "low" culture until, by the end of the century, poetry had become a product almost exclusively by and for an intellectual elite.
The conditions that made poetry difficult in the mid-Victorian period also made it seem especially important. In the first place, for those able to retain their Christian faith, religious poetry became an important aid to devotional feeling, and possibly even a means to draw the discordant elements in English society back to the spiritual unity of the Church. Keble's
Christian Year
and innumerable Victorian hymns became extremely popular aids to piety. One of the age's finest religious poets, John Henry Newman, argued that "the poetical mind is one full of the eternal forms of beauty and perfection" so that, inevitably, "Revealed Religion" and "the virtues peculiarly Christian are especially poeticalmeekness, gentleness, compassion, contentment, modesty, not to mention the devotional virtues." As Aubrey de Vere made clear, for true Christians the age was not unpoetical at all: ''That any age not too late for virtue, too late for religion, and too late for the human affections, should be really too late for poetry we cannot believe,although it may easily be unpoetical in its outward features." And of course the devotional poetry of Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many others quite clearly shows that religious faith could and did continue to inspire powerful poetry.
But for those troubled by doubt, the call for an authoritative poetry seemed especially urgent when there was seemingly too much to know and apparently no way to integrate and internalize knowledge within a coherent worldview. At mid-century Arnold saw what Keats called the "grand march of intellect" as both an opportunity and a difficulty for the poet: "The poet's matter being
the hitherto experience of the world, and his own
, increases with every century. . . . For me you may often hear my sinews cracking under the effort to unite matter." Arnold felt that the din of competing discoursesand the lack of any one controlling master discoursehad overwhelmed the poetry of Keats, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Arthur Hugh Clough with a confused "multitudinousness," and ultimately, he came to believe that the lack of a coherent contemporary "Idea of the world" made great poetry impossible in the present age. Although he believed that at some future time poetry might again be possible, he was convinced that his own age of transition was inevitably an age of "unpoetrylessness."
 
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Unlike Macaulay, Arnold did not believe that the unpoetic character of the present age meant that poetry itself was outmoded. On the contrary, he was the most influential spokesman for the view that the high mission of poetry was to provide the kind of intellectual coherence, spiritual solace, and moral guidance that religion had formerly supplied. For Arnold, therefore, "the future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, win find an ever surer and surer stay." Poetry becomes all the more important precisely because in the present age "there is not a creed which is not shaken, nor an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve."
Arnold was one of many Victorians who looked to poetry for a "stay" against the dissolution of all tradition. Francis Palgrave, in his introductory lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1886, asserted that the "imperial function" of poetry "shines forth as the practical guiding power over a whole nation, leading them to higher, holier, and nobler things.'' In an otherwise chaotic time it seemed all the more necessary that poets, as Palgrave said, interpret "each country to itself " and so make "the nations alive . . . to their own unity." Reflecting the "unity of the nation" to itself was the object of some ambitious poets, but it was profoundly difficult to reflect the unity of a much-divided nation, and it seemed increasingly difficult to assume the role of bardic prophet and spiritual leader.
Although the early efforts of both Tennyson and Robert Browning were experiments in the high Romantic visionary mode of the prophetbard, and although a diverse group of poets eventually labeled the "Spasmodic School" (most notably Philip James Bailey, Ebenezer Jones, Alexander Smith, and Sydney Dobell) briefly strutted gargantuan neo-Byronic egos across the Victorian scene, the "egotistical sublime" of Wordsworth discoursing from the mountaintop, the titanic self-revelations of Byron, and the apocalyptic rhapsodies of Shelley gradually came to seem outmoded. The Victorians wrote a great many very long poems, including such astonishingly ambitious epic works as Bailey's
Festus
(1839), Dobell's
Balder
(1853), and E. H. Bickersteth's Christian epic
Yesterday, To-Day, and Forever
(1866), but the age was too diverse to produce anything like a great national epic. Instead, the best long poems of the age reflect multitudinousness by compiling kaleidoscopic perspectives in linked series of shorter poemsthe best
 
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examples are Tennyson's
In Memoriam
and
Maud
, the sonnet sequences of
Sonnets from the Portuguese
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Modern Love
by George Meredith,
The House of Life
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and such experiments in shifting perspectives as Clough's
Amours de Voyage
and Robert Browning's magisterial
The Ring and the Book
.
Palgrave's ideal of a national poet was unrealizable in an age so multitudinous that the Arnoldian injunction to "see life steadily and see it whole" was clearly impossible. Further, to the extent that the individual mind is formed within and as a reflection of the surrounding culture, the instabilities of Victorian culture resulted inevitably in instabilities in the sense of self of individual poets. The poet could hardly represent the national self when he or she could not find or express a fully coherent personal self. Although perhaps best understood as a dramatic portrait, one of Tennyson's early poems suggests a characteristically Tennysonian problem even in its title: "Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind not in Unity with Itself."
Similarly, in some of his finest poetry Matthew Arnold lamented the lack of unity both in society and in the self, and noted the lack of a unified outlook in his poetry by remarking "that my poems are fragments
i.e.
that I am fragments." Fortunately, however, those poets who deeply felt the difficulties of formulating a coherent sense of self in an incoherent age were able to use the difficulties themselves as the complex subject matter of such poems as Tennyson's
Maud
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Aurora Leigh
, Robert Browning's many dramatic monologues, and Clough's
Amours de Voyage
.
The major poets did not abandon either the idea of art as introspective and self-expressive or the commitment to write for the moral edification of their contemporaries, although they struggled to reconcile these somewhat incompatible ambitions. The problem is acutely evident in the early poetry of Tennyson, whose finest early lyrics reflected ambivalence about the role of the poet. "Mariana," "The Lady of Shalott," and ''The Palace of Art," for example, evidently allegorize the difficulties of the artistic soul, torn between living in autonomous isolation from the workaday world and the imperative to do one's duty within that world. Further, the representation in these poems of the aesthetic temperament as female suggests a division within the male poeta sense that artistic cultivation of the feelings is effeminate and escapist and is opposed to a more vigorous (though less attractive) masculine call to duty.
 
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Like Tennyson's, Robert Browning's early works reflect Victorian uncertainties primarily in their concern with the problems faced by a poet who simultaneously wants to serve a Romantic ideal of poetical autonomy and to speak to and for his rapidly changing society. In the first decade of his career Browning attempted a quasi-Shelleyan Romantic "confessional" poem in "Pauline," a Byronic closet drama in
Paracelsus
, a quasi-Shakespearean historical tragedy in
Strafford
, a wholly new form in his earliest dramatic lyrics, a bizarre form of epic narrative in
Sordello
, and an extraordinary medley of conventional drama, closet drama, narrative, and lyric in
Pippa Passes
. In various thematic and formal ways all of these works reflect the uncertainties, the multitudinousness, of the early Victorian agebut as experiments in genre, they particularly reflect Browning's concern to come to terms with the relation of the modern poet to his audience in an increasingly democratic age. They are all concerned with what the speaker of "Pauline" self-mockingly calls "The vaunted influence poets have o'er men!" Although such influence, on the whole, is apparently to be desired, Browning hints that the imperial poetic imagination could be tyrannical in its attempts to ''make / All bow enslaved." Similarly, Paracelsus, although he expresses a desire "to serve my race," is characterized by his contempt for the rest of mankind, by a desire for knowledge, which is power.
The thematic concern with poetic authority is paralleled in the experiments in genre. "Pauline," for example, does not merely recapitulate the confessional mode, but calls into question the authority and value of the Romantic egotistical sublime, especially the notion of an autonomous poetic genius "Existing as a centre to all things / Most potent to create and rule." Although the speaker alternately proclaims and repudiates his pride, the desire for knowledge is repeatedly linked with a Faustian desire to usurp the throne of God, to be worshipped.
Browning next attempted to explore the moral issues raised by the quest for authoritative knowledge in
Paracelsus
, a closet drama that enabled him not only to maintain a distance from his central speaker, but also to introduce other speakers and other points of view, to reduce his central speaker to one voice among many. The work was both thematically and formally concerned with the need to share in the making of meaning, not only among the represented characters, but between the poet and his reader: "A work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its successindeed
 
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were my scenes stars it must be his cooperating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellationa Lyre or a Crown."
Sordello
seems a still more radical attempt to share the responsiblity for making meaning with the reader, who must actively fill in the gaps left by the speaker: "what I supplied yourselves suggest, / What I leave bare yourselves can now invest." These lines clearly forgo the authoritative, coercive role of the poet, but they state only one of many positions in the poem's bewilderingly conflicted analysis of the poet's role. The choice, or invention, of a genrea quasi-epic narrative studded with authorial intrusions, questionings, uncertainties, and utterly without epic actionsuggests that the real concern of the poem is not its obscure plot, but its meditations on poetic authority. Unfortunately, the audience that was apparently expected to share in the making of meaning in
Sordello
found the task nearly impossible, and Browning's most ambitious attempt to share in the making of meaning led only to an early reputation for impenetrable obscurity.
Browning's other early works were much more traditional in formdramas intended for the stage. In a series of plays written for the producer/actor Charles Macready, however, Browning achieved only a limited success. Serious theater had fallen on hard times in the nineteenth century, and successful stage production demanded emphatically clear, usually melodramatic plots, and leading characters who could be portrayed in the high histrionic style of Macready and other prominent actors of the day. By any standardsand certainly by these standardsBrowning's dramas were deficient in action and clarity. He was far more interested in the subtle and complex motivations of individual characters than in dramatic action, with the result that he overloaded the plays with long soul-searching monologues that obscure more than they clarify the central dramatic conflicts.
As Browning said, his plays were concerned with "the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study." The representation of what he called "Action in Character, rather than Character in Action" was doomed to failure on the conventional stage, but in a different genre it was to become Browning's most distinctive poetic concern. In the remarkably innovative
Pippa Passes
he devised a hybrid genre in which brief dramatic vignettes, interrupted by suddenly overheard lyrics, led to subtle explorations of individual motives, and to sudden revelationsin effect, he constructed a medium in which "incidents in the development of a soul" culminated in abrupt ''Action in Character."

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