In molecular physics “surface tension” describes the effect of molecular bonding at the surface of a liquid. By virtue of being on top, these molecules have fewer molecules with which to bond, thus the energetic bonds between them are stronger than they would otherwise be. I use this metaphor because in the poems I examine a similar bonding effect occurs within the poem’s lexicon; homophonic relationships such as internal rhyme, near-rhyme, repetition, alliteration, metathesis, and assonance (what Hopkins called “oftening, over-and-overing, aftering”)viii tend to draw the reader’s attention to the sounds and shapes of the words themselves, at times distracting her from the semantic meaning the words are meant to impart.ix In other instances, metonymic and associative chains, as well as intertextual references, neologisms, excessive detail, rhythmic disruptions, and the anagrammatic and decorative aspects of words and letters, similarly distract the reader from the poem’s story or message, creating the sense that the thickened surface is distinct from, and perhaps in the way of, the poem’s actual content. However, to return to physics, when a fluid demonstrates surface tension, one need only to pierce the surface to discover that the difference between surface and depth is an illusion; the two are molecularly (though not energetically) identical. This is how I understand the poetry I address; despite the resistance of the surface, there exists a fluid continuity between the poem’s conceptual content and its form. My analysis of the formal qualities of these poetries thus does not stand at a remove from either the poems’ contexts or the social meanings they express. Rather, as in the formalist criticism of Herbert Tucker, Isobel Armstrong, Susan Wolfson, and many others, formal analysis is meant to reveal how poetry makes meanings at the level of its most intricate and intimate engagements with language.
This study thus asks questions about how the Victorians understood the social uses of poetry and of the aesthetic more broadly. But it also asks a more general question about how aesthetic productions that emphasize ornament and affect might be understood to participate in social critique and, ultimately, in social change. In this sense my project contributes to the growing interest in the political possibilities of aesthetic forms, one that has tended, with some notable exceptions, to focus on Romantic or contemporary texts.x I assert the primacy of Victorian poetry in terms of its political commitments as well as its lasting relevance to contemporary poets and theorists of poetics, arguing that this poetry is relevant to us now specifically because of how the difficult aesthetic surface is invoked as an agent of radical change. Thus, while this study is in one sense historical, it is also theoretical. The periodization of literary texts makes sense when we are reading these texts for the history, literary and otherwise, of which they speak. But texts and the theoretical positions within them have lives that extend far beyond their historical origination, even as they necessarily carry that history as well. “The work of art . . . is essentially a-historic . . . ,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “[for] the specific historicity of works of art is not manifested in the ‘history of art’ but in their interpretations” (qtd. in Moses, 85).
Thus I read these poems not only for what they teach us about the years in which they were written, but also for how they might help us to reflect on our contemporary assumptions and attitudes about how aesthetic productions participate in transformation.
2.
With this equivocal periodization in mind, I would like to begin with a text that hangs between the Romantic and Victorian periods: John Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion.” The poem, a revision of Keats’s earlier Hyperion fragment, was written in 1819, but was not printed until 1856, and even then in a very limited edition. Bridges and Hopkins knew the poem, but it is likely that Arnold, Rossetti, and Morris were familiar only with the earlier version, published in 1820.xi However, this is less a question of influence than of confluence: I choose “The Fall” because it is here that Keats most clearly lays out the problem of poetry’s social usefulness once the dominance of depth over surface is undone. I choose Keats, rather than the more obviously political Shelley, for three reasons. First, Keats is the most beloved poet of the Pre-Raphaelites. Drawn to his medievalism, his enthrallment with sensation, the struggle in his work between the ideal and the real, the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (PRB), and Tennyson before them, turned to Keats as an important, even necessary, predecessor. xii Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt’s first exhibited painting at the Academy was “The Eve of St. Agnes,” taken from Keats’s poem of that name. John Millais’s first painting that bore the PRB insignia was of a scene from Keats’s “Isabella” (Thompson, 51). The convergence of the original Pre-Raphaelites—including Rossetti, Hunt and Millais—occurred at least in part because of their shared enthusiasm for Keats. Some critics maintain that it was in fact Keats’s interest in Italian art before the time of Raphael that inspired Rossetti to come up with the term “Pre-Raphaelite.” xiii William Morris concludes News from Nowhere with a direct reference to the last line of “Ode to a Nightingale.”xiv Matthew Arnold was also strongly influenced by Keats—perhaps most interestingly so because the influence was also agonistic.xv
I begin with Keats also because if periodization has anything to do with reception, then Keats is in at least one limited sense a Victorian poet. It was in the Victorian period that Keats’s poetry, as George Ford puts it, “came into its own” (2).xvi There were no reprints of Keats’s work until 1840, and the first biography of Keats was published in 1848. Ford’s important study, Keats and the Victorians, makes clear that the Victorian poets and Keats hold each other in mutual debt: while the former owe much of their art to Keats’s influence, he owes much of his fame to theirs.xvii
The third reason I have chosen to begin with Keats has to do with precisely how Keats’s work might be read as critical, as opposed to purely aestheticist. Keats’s poetry, like that of Rossetti and Hopkins, is not, or rarely, overtly political in theme. Rather, the poems openly consider, or simply evoke, questions about the relationship between aesthetic experience and social responsibility. While such concerns run throughout Keats’s poems and letters, “The Fall of Hyperion” most directly confronts the pressing question of the artist’s social role, a question that animates all of this book’s subsequent chapters.xviii
In the now canonical essay, “The Resistance to Theory” (1986), Paul de Man takes on various semantic uncertainties and opacities in the title of “The Fall of Hyperion” in order to demonstrate how “the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means” (15). “No grammatical decoding,” de Man continues, “however refined, could claim to reach the determining figural dimensions of a text” (16). De Man points to two moments of indeterminacy in Keats’s title, and argues that once introduced, these options create alternative ways of understanding the poem, alternatives which contradict each other to such a degree that they invent an impasse of understanding just at the poem’s entryway. We do not need to repeat the specifics of de Man’s argument here, but it is important to note that for de Man, this undoing of grammatical sense is not mere play.xix Rather, such reading practices constitute the heroic appeal of literary theory, for it is precisely this “disturbance of the stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic” (17) that allows theory to do the work of “upset[ting] rooted ideologies by revealing the mechanics of their workings” (11).
The choice of Keats as an object-lesson for such “upsetting” is no accident, of course, for Keats theorized the pleasures and profits of indeterminacy long before de Man. “Negative capability”—the capacity to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—is one way of defining de Manian “reading.” And yet, what we find when we move beyond the title of “The Fall” is that for Keats, language’s opacity, rather than simply imposing a destabilizing force into ideologies, presents ethical problems, problems that Keats does not resolve (and neither, of course, does de Man). And it is precisely these ethical problems, as we will see, which resound so deeply in the works of nineteenth-century poets who follow