Finally, I dedicated this book to Tim Roberts, for love.
INTRODUCTION
On he flared . . .
John Keats, “The Fall of Hyperion” i
1.
If a poem has a surface and a depth—the one embellishing, ornamental, and attractive, the other meaningful, soulful, ideational—there can be little debate about which is the principal part. The poem’s surface, its formal devices and linguistic play, is valuable for what it serves: its role is supportive, and therefore secondary. The poem’s depth, whether construed as idea, argument, emotional truth, or narrative, is by contrast valuable even when the surface is removed, even when the poem is translated into ordinary speech. But what happens when the pathway from surface to depth approaches impenetrability? What happens to the poem’s importance, its value, its force, when its decorative qualities begin to assert themselves over and into content, when the poem’s argument or message loses itself in the folds of ornament?
These are the questions of modern and postmodern poetics and might seem to have less purchase in a study of Victorian poetry—a poetry that is commonly understood to be perhaps decorative, but primarily ideological, devotional, narrative, or dramatic, and not, as in the self-conscious works of the twentieth century, intensely focused on language’s surfaces, on language as surface.ii And yet, from Tennyson’s highly wrought sonic experiments to Swinburne’s metrically vigorous and syntactically complex poems, one finds in Victorian poetry a longing for language to move toward abstraction—to move in the directions that the modernists—Mallarmé, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky, for example—would take it, toward “the condition of music.”
In the poets I examine, this interest in the surfaces of language is particularly intensified. Furthermore, many of the deep un-rests of the latter half of the nineteenth century—the epistemological, political, and social tensions of the period—register themselves in and as a debate about the status of the surface in poetics. As Victorian poets and theorists of poetry and art—Arthur Hallam, J. S. Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—sought to define the social role of the poet and of poetry in their period, sought to understand or forge a relationship between poetry and social change, cultural criticism, revolutionary or conservative political positions, they participated in a long and ongoing debate about the social value of highly wrought aesthetic surfaces.
As its title indicates, this book examines the relationships among such complex textual surfaces, extreme or intense affect, and engagements with temporality in the works of four major poets: Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.iii With the exception of Arnold, these poets and their poems speak for a specific strain in Victorian temporality, especially as it is applied to visions of social change. Whereas the Victorian period is generally and justly thought of as dedicated to gradual, developmental social progress, numerous studies from Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s seminal book, The Triumph of Time (1966), forward have argued that the latter half of the nineteenth century experienced an “apocalyptic mood,” a mood encouraged by developments in physics, geology, biology, politics, and by growing religious doubt.iv I argue that the formal intricacy of much of the poetry of this late Victorian period, while often deliberately employed to provoke intense affectivity, also and importantly serves to invoke this cataclysmic, as opposed to progressive, sense of change.
I chose Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins as primary subjects because of the ways in which each models this cultural engagement with cataclysmic temporality, though each poet turns his attention toward a different arena of—and for—change. Rossetti’s lens is firstly focused on selfhood, on erotic and aesthetic experiences and their effects on the transformation of the self. Morris, a committed socialist (who, long before reading Marx, was deeply concerned with the problems of alienated and oppressed labor), focused on social and political transformation—eventually on Marxist revolution per se, but earlier in his career on revolutionizing aesthetic production as a means toward achieving a revolutionized political and economic future. Hopkins was, of course, concerned with spiritual transformation, that of the individual subject, and that of the larger community. My fourth figure, though the one I discuss first, Matthew Arnold, stands somewhat uneasily as the counterpoint to these poets of transformation. Arnold was by all accounts a gradualist, consistently working toward developmental social change, mostly through advancements in public education. And yet, in his poetics (though not necessarily in his poems, as we will see), Arnold argues for a conservative aesthetic, one that privileges content over form, or depth over surface. Poems, for Arnold, function best when they are transparent spheres in which ideas can be contained. This poetics of containment, wed as it is to gradualist ideas of progress, is thus contrasted with the poetics of surface, which the other poets in this study so enthusiastically perform.
Deeply dissatisfied with the political and cultural moment in which they found themselves, Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins imagined their work in revolutionary terms, even though this meant quite different things for each of them. My intention will be to demonstrate the connections these poets forged between the intricacies of their poetic surfaces and the sudden transformations they imagined.v
Thomas Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdrockh announces the period’s fascination with the problem of surface and depth when, in his “Philosophy of Clothes,” he “expounds the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; [and] undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man’s earthly interests, ‘are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes’” (Carlyle, 40). Teufelsdrockh insists that “Society is founded upon Cloth,” while his editor maintains that “a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one)” (50). Of course Carlyle’s prose and the layered structure of his “splendid rhapsody” (xxii) provide ample opportunity for thinking about the relationship between surface and depth in literary works. One hardly knows whether for Carlyle artifice is a burden (as he argues in “Characteristics,” his treatise against self-consciousness) or a source of authorial pride. Perhaps both.
More than forty years later, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “Poetry is speech . . . framed to be heard for its own sake and interest over and above its interests of meaning,” and we understand this as defense of and encouragement for his own ornate and densely woven textual surfaces (Journals, 289). By placing the value of the poetic utterance directly on language as such, rather than on its referent, Hopkins, the most “modern” of the poets in question, turns our attention to the sensations that poetic language creates rather than the cognitions that it provokes.
This valuation of surface is everywhere in Hopkins (even though for Hopkins, the surfaces of the physical world, what he called “inscape,” provide the deepest, because eternal, Revelation).vi But importantly, Hopkins’s celebration of the surface is not unique in late Victorian poetics. Indeed, much British poetry written during the latter half of the century by the Pre-Raphaelites and those associated with them emphasizes surfaces both as subject-matter for poems and as the most valued aspect of poems themselves. Rossetti’s faces and reflections, Morris’s fabrics and fonts, Hopkins’s cloud formations and animal hides—all of these register an obsession with visual pattern and form—what Ruskin called “the science of aspects.” Needless to say, Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins were not only writing about visual surfaces, they were also immersed in creating and evaluating visual arts. While Hopkins was not a painter, he considered becoming one early on, and his notebooks are filled with sketches and references