We can understand how gender plays into this debate by looking into one of Arnold’s defining metaphors. When providing an answer to the ineffective and emotionally burdened surfaces of the works he resists (including, his own), Arnold calls for a poetry of wholeness and unity—for which he employs the metaphor of pregnancy. The poem is pregnant, however, not with its own likeness: it is pregnant with the progeny of the (masculine) critic—that is, it is pregnant with criticism’s rationally achieved ideas. Thus, even as Arnold genders poetry female, in deemphasizing the importance of the surface, and emphasizing instead the poem’s ideational and “disinterested” content, Arnold effectively remasculates the work of poetry. As Naomi Schor argues, neoclassical aesthetics (such as Arnold’s), in privileging wholeness, abstraction, and ideology over fragment, materiality, and contingency, reveals a “persistent association” “with the discourse of misogyny” (5).xxii
Indeed, Arnold’s rejection of desire as a subject worthy of poetry and the embrace of desire as the primary subject of interest for Rossetti, the motivating force for social change by Morris, and the ground of both spiritual and poetic exaltation for Hopkins, can be usefully read within the context of Victorian masculinity. While desire finds a voice in poetry by women from the period—Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, Christina Rossetti’s exploration of the crisis of amorous relationships, and the homoerotic theme to be found in some of the poetry of Michael Field provide the most well-known examples—the issues attending female poetry about desire and male poetry about desire are fundamentally different and require different kinds of negotiations from their authors.xxiii For Victorian women, assuming the position of subject rather than object of desire (or, in the case of Michael Field, assuming both) is in itself a political act. For male writers from the period, representing unresolved longing and desire renders them the target of attacks such as Arnold’s on “The Keatsian School” and Buchanan’s on “The Fleshly School.” As arguments against the uses of desire in male poetry have historically lead to restrictive notions of what poems can and should do, this study examines how three poets resisted precisely these restrictions, thus not only inventing new poetics, but also re-imagining Victorian masculinity in the process.xxiv And while gender is not always central to my readings, it is always relevant to my characterization of the poets in question.xxv
My first chapter, “Matthew Arnold’s Pregnant Poetry,” reads Arnold’s poetics as a counter-example to the poetics of surface tension. I begin by connecting Arnold’s rejection of desire as a fit subject for poetry to the rhetoric of pregnancy and the pregnant body that supports, undermines, and exposes the limits of Arnoldian cultural and aesthetic ideology. In direct contrast with Keats, Arnold positions himself against “all feelings of contradiction, and irritation, and impatience,” all expressions of irresolvable desire, and in the process constructs a poetics that, while insisting on poetry as an implement of cultural development, removes from poetry, or “poetry only,” any autonomous political agency; the figure of the poet as creative agent is replaced by a poetry that only acts insofar as it relies parasitically on “criticism.” Because for Arnold the poem’s function is essentially ideological, the pregnant poem necessitates a transparent theory of language and form. Furthermore, this poem, imagined as an “inviolable” sealed sphere, suggests a body not productive but rather statically suspended in a state of perpetual pregnancy. If, however, Arnold seems to imagine pregnancy, and thus poetry, as something kept forever in the realm of pure potential, other moments in his work—such as the famous “Wragg” passage in “The Function of Criticism” and the songs of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna—suggest that he was also anxiously aware of poetic language’s capacity to generate meaning at the level of its surfaces, to produce an excess that his criticism could not in fact contain. In these moments of verbal play, what we might call, following Roman Jakobson, the poetic function, evokes the limits of Arnold’s poetics of pregnancy, as well as suggesting the limits of his more politically focused valuations of gradualism and containment.
My second chapter, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Aesthetics of Emergency,” argues that despite Rossetti’s alleged indifference to politics, Rossetti’s work, emphasizing the very affects that Arnold advises “banishing” from the mind of the poet—desire, anxiety, irresolution—directly confronts the political predicament wherein the individual is thoroughly mediated both by the art and literary markets and by the institution of marriage. In readings of the early (though multiply revised) prose piece “St. Agnes of Intercession” and of three complexly surfaced sonnets from The House of Life, I argue alongside critics such as Jerome McGann and Elizabeth Helsinger that for Rossetti throughout his career, aesthetic productions, whether paintings or poems, are never free from the pressures of the market. I emphasize, however, that even as mediation thus becomes one of Rossetti’s central themes, aesthetic labor is nonetheless presented as capable of liberating subjects from the institutions that threaten to subsume them. Furthermore, in poetic investigations of desire’s constitution and attainments, Rossetti constructs an “ethics of Eros” in which desire, rather than locking the subject in self-scrutiny, moves him outward toward the beloved, who remains incommensurable. This, I argue, enacts a resistance to the Victorian ideology of marriage as an indissoluble union of perfectly mirroring opposites. And yet, even as aesthetic and erotic desire (the two are generally conflated) are presented as capable of liberating subjects from the pressures of institutional forces, Rossetti’s densely textured poems recognize and comment on the ways cultural institutions specifically produce and limit desire. This paradox is the “emergency” to which my title refers, but the word also suggests the cataclysmic transformation, the emergence, of the individual that Rossetti’s poems and prose construct. xxvi
Rossetti’s “politics” is thus a politics of the personal—of the individual male subject resisting the pressure to give over his affective property to the institution of marriage and his aesthetic property to the demands of the market. Rossetti’s is a heterosexual masculinity that therefore positions itself outside of cultural norms even as the defensiveness of this position can seem, for today’s readers, an aggressive and masculinist individualism. If we recall the attack on the aesthetic put forth most strongly by critics Jerome McGann and Terry Eagleton in the '80s, and early '90s in which the ideology of the “autonomous art-object,” supposedly supported by Romanticism’s concept of organic form, is seen as contributing to capitalism’s repressive ideological claims for the bourgeois subject’s autonomy, or as irresponsibly avoiding its own historical/social placement, Rossetti’s heroics of desire might seem a case in point. As Eagleton describes it, the concept of aesthetic autonomy, seen from what he calls a “radical political viewpoint,” is “disabling”:
It is not only . . . that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. It is also, rather more subtly, that the idea of autonomy—of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining—provides the middle class with just the ideological model of subjectivity it requires for its material operations. (Eagleton, 9)
However, Rossetti, far from assuming the art object to be autonomous, recognizes and addresses the debt that all aesthetic productions owe to material (and market) forces. The Rossettian subject wins his distinction from such forces not by imaging himself as immune from the market and its ideologies, but rather because his very dependence upon the market compels him to become its critic.
A third chapter, “Murder in Utopia: William Morris and the Surface of Desire,” examines Morris’s writings on politics and design, his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, and his decorated manuscript, A Book of Verse. While Morris’s textile designs provide striking examples of complexly patterned surfaces, his poetry itself tends toward narration, evenness of meter, and regularity of rhyme, and thus, of all the poets discussed, he seems the least interested in the surfaces of language. The calligraphic and intricately ornamental poems of the 1870 A Book of Verse, however, by virtue of the exuberant ornamental