“A Word of Explanation”: Keats, Sharif, Waldrop, Patmore, Arnold, Blake, Capildeo, Mullen, Forbes, Bonney

As a culture of partisan magazines arose in the Long Eighteenth Century and evolved into what Henry James identified in both England and the United States as “the newspaperized world,” ideas of “opinion” changed, as did poetry – connectedly.Footnote ¹ Mass print, along with the railways, telegraph, and the expansion of specialized and sometimes incommunicable forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, generated a sea of discourse belying Jürgen Habermas’s vision of a cogent “public sphere.”Footnote ² We still live in this stretched moment, where to have an opinion is to proclaim an identity, and utterance, scaled up, becomes unforeseeably volatile.

It’s worth explaining how I came to write this Element: a short monograph requiring alternatives to the rhetorics by which scholars, as Samuel Johnson would have it, “improve opinion into knowledge.”Footnote ³ Or pretend to. Researching the Indian-American poet A. K. Ramanujan, I found this remark:

Astonishingly and inspiringly unorthodox, this nixes an assumption so pervasive as to dominate our thinking around literature and selfhood: the idea that we are our opinions, which express what’s essential about us and represent our truest reckoning with sociopolitical realities. Though professors disparage readers who think texts merely coded or embroidered opinions for which we should praise or condemn their authors, our scholarship and teaching remain closer to this model than we admit. Post-Romantic and postindustrial individualism sponsors, in multiple, overlapping, domains, the vision of a “solid self-centered self,” in Tracy K. Smith’s phrase, declaring its self-authorship by deploying, as portals between private and public space, opinions functioning as both statements of principle and acts of democratic intervention.Footnote ⁵

Here and now, in 2026, social media places front and center the problem of reflective discourse degrading into opining. Where all utterance is conceived as variously encoded position-taking, the only alternative to stating the obvious – following, reinforcing, the party line, within one’s own embattled subculture – is to flabbergast with left-field hot-takes. You’re out either to confirm or to shock: Any space thoughtful dissent creates for itself begins immediately to erode. But a longer cultural history going back to the 18th and 19th centuries is required, if we’re to understand how we got here – as I realized while writing a lecture on Ramanujan and the Romantic essayist William Hazlitt. Since that essay is published in the Hazlitt Review, I’ll be briefer here.Footnote ⁶ As I see it, Hazlitt becomes the first theorist of not public opinion (as theorized previously, with Vergil and Shakespeare, for instance, depicting it as a hydra-headed monster) but opinion in the new, Romantic sense of the isolable, bursting utterance which affirms a supposedly freestanding, agential, self, moving linearly and irreversibly from thought, via speech, into action.Footnote ⁷ It is the utterance-mode of our time, and Hazlitt shows how this came about, analyzing speeches in Parliament as well as literature. Opinions emerge from disguised psychological undercurrents (Hazlitt is, as we’ll see, especially acute about contrarianism) both personal and shared; their seriousness and ardor masks the fact that, even when aspiring to policy, opinions remain creaturely utterances.

To isolate 21st-century dissensus and disinformation as an unprecedentedly and exclusively internetified situation is not only false, but reproduces the tendency of opinion-culture to circularly discuss (affectively reiterate) itself in a presentist way. Hazlitt is alert to the simultaneous beginnings of the public sphere and the attention economy; he remarks, for example, of the coffee-house culture Habermas sugarcoats, that 19th-century Londoners “spend their time and their breath in coffee-houses and other places of public resort, hearing or repeating some new thing … It is strange that people should take so much interest at one time in what they so soon forget.” The problem carries across to the United States, and, as Michael Warner has it, the simultaneous emergence in the 18th century of “an emerging political language – republicanism – and a new set of ground rules for discourse – the public sphere.” It was in this period that, in Europe too, “intensive reading,” in Rolf Engelsing’s formulation, was replaced by “extensive reading” – with people encountering countless newspapers, pamphlets, and books, and flitting between. The complaint was – turning to James Wald – “that ceaseless periodical reading fostered passivity, reducing culture to something ‘only supposed to distract’.”Footnote ⁸ Which sounds like today’s complaints about smartphones. But it’s actually Goethe talking.

My interest is in a special problem that poetry and poetics can help us understand. In short – because, when they appear in verse, claims about reality have been characterized, or have self-characterized, as unreal, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry can make perceptible other ways in which, in other precincts, utterance is, in my word, virtualized. Sometimes by the psychological turbulences of the citizen-as-creature, appropriating world events to self-assertion; sometimes, as a result of affective matrices too encompassing to grasp, that refute the idea that we author our own opinions. To declare one’s position is to stake a claim to self-determination, yet it is precisely at this moment that we often expose ourselves as channels for preexisting controversies.

Encountering Ramanujan, and seeking equally counterintuitive opinions about opinion in a poetic context, I found something said by Thom Gunn on the subject of 16th-century verse – where he locates “a style that is essentially one of statement, starting with a need to withdraw from experience into a formulation about it so as not to be overwhelmed by it.”Footnote ⁹ Why is he, why are we, wrongfooted by this? It is, I think, that we have so totally absorbed the idea that opinionated language is the point of maximal engagement with political “experience” – the very opposite of withdrawal. From this vantage, Renaissance maxim and commonplace culture seems recoverable only as a curio. That language can, achieving form, function as a homeostatic defense against a world of technologized experiences and colliding values experienced as “incorrigibly plural” becomes a counter-truth preserved in post-Romantic poems.

I’m quoting from Louis MacNeice’s “Snow,” using verse in the place of theory. We could do this more often. Though in conversation with scholars, this Element experiments with new styles of claim-making (scrutinizing what we’re up to when we opine), seeing poetry as a transnational and transhistorical mode of cognition in its own right, that we needn’t always approach through lyric theory, historical poetics, or book history – rich as those fields are. Although I center the “virtual,” my sentences aren’t subordinated to the generation of a concept: They rove. I’m interested in alternatives to the opinion-cultures of literary scholarship itself, with its professionalized emphasis on vast claims emerging from supposedly comprehensive, but really, often, meagre, even navel-gazing, genealogies.

“Our culture’s understanding of how political persuasion works is wrong,” writes Sarah Stein Lubrano: “arguments alone have no meaningful effect on people’s beliefs.”Footnote ¹⁰ Yet we continue to conceive of change only in terms of combative conversation and spectacular protest. In turn, literary scholarship seeks from a poem a decided stance, or to locate within it an act of subversion yet to be activated and therefore idealizable. This idea of speaking truth to power arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Warner puts it, criticizing Habermas’s eventually “highly idealized account of argumentative dialogue,”

Sometimes, heroically, change does happen this way – voices are heard, people rise up. But to universalize this situation obscures situations where utterance isn’t so much suppressed, as insidiously energized, canalized, reclassified, and sidetracked, to the point of being superintended by what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “culture industry,” I call “opinion-culture,” and Richard Seymour, concentrating on social media, the “Twittering Machine.” Where he distinguishes the 19th century from what’s happening now, I sense continuity:

It’s true that activist outcry brought about real and lasting change in the 19th century, as when pamphlets and petitions conveyed, says William St. Clair, “such an unprecedented display of public feeling” that “by 1807 parliament had agreed to abolish the British slave trade, and by the end of the romantic period, faced with an even greater demonstration of opinion mobilized with the help of public meetings, and vast distributions of free print, had decided to abolish slavery itself.”Footnote ¹³ And the special scripturience Seymour describes is indeed unique to social media. But the machine set to generate monetizable controversy was already at work in the 19th century, keeping Hazlitt’s coffee-drinkers chattering – the Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase the chattering classes to 1846.

The operations of opinion-culture today don’t contradict the “old story,” but coexist with it: “a historically minded scholar seeking intellectual orientation and some measure of emotional reassurance,” writes Maurice S. Lee, “might notice that concerns about the relationship of information and literature also loomed in nineteenth-century America and Britain.”Footnote ¹⁴ We can go further, considering news-flows between metropoles and colonies. “During the rain, which is invariably the most fashionable season in Calcutta,” writes Henry Derozio – in 1826 – ships from England bring “matter of much political importance, or intelligence which is interesting, if it can only make the multitude gape with wonder.” Sticking his “or” in, he observes the convergence of matters of moment with sensationalist pap for the colonized. Indian readers of English newspapers are enthralled by editors who “make murders and suicides, with the hope of keeping public attention alive … when these little ingenious manoeuvres are not played or rather palmed upon the public, there is an awful paucity of conversational topics; indeed it causes some people more distress than the present want of Bullion in England has created among the Mercantile Community.”Footnote ¹⁵

The pressure to opine exerted upon, and internalized, by modern selves, has been and still is obfuscated by rhetorics (that don’t always correspond to realities) of enfranchisement. Is it always empowering, to be asked for one’s opinion and to give it?

Consider, for example, Contre Sainte-Beuve, the possible hybrid of fiction and literary metacriticism that Marcel Proust authored in the final years of the 19th century; which uses the situation of feeling aggrieved by a critic’s opinions, and wanting to hit back, to analyze literature’s relation to everyday grasping contentiousness.Footnote ¹⁶ For Proust, Sainte-Beuve’s arrogance reveals a desire to dominate the conversation, to have his opinions about books taken up by everybody. Yet he also seems helpless before trends turning the best things about him into irritable reactions, a gestural and postural repertoire preventing him from truly understanding literary works, other people, or himself. He is at once an egregiously refined, hothouse specimen, and an everyman of opinion-culture. For as Sainte-Beuve relinquishes, says Proust, his best, yet-to-mature, ideas, to the “forced productivity” of a writer for newspapers and magazines, the exigencies of the journalist overlap with how anyone at all might sacrifice their idiosyncrasy to the desire to be understood. In “his thin-skinnedness, his natural inconstancy, his rapid intolerance of what at first he could not have enough of,” Sainte-Beuve is typical of the citizen addicted to stances of outrage and indignation; he has no ideas but in catchphrases he wishes others to repeat (as, today, they might retweet): “I call it ‘the Baudelaire Folly’ (always these ‘sayings,’ sayings that clever people can quote with a chuckle – He calls it the Baudelaire Folly).” Internalizing a degraded idea of his own audience, Sainte-Beuve can only write sentences of which it might approve. His very thought-process is prostituted to publicity, and since the necessity of performing a role comes first, even his protestations of humility – of being just one voice among many – don’t convince.

Proust describes a better sort of literary thinking, which refuses “the ready-made phrases … we take at second-hand – and from such hands!”, “the coarse veil of appearances which disguises our thought from us at every turn, and which the mob in perpetual ignorance remains content with.” Which may seem snobby – this is how, for example, one poet vital to me, W. B. Yeats, is often read. But to understand how post-Romantic verse has actively and ingeniously considered, probed, analyzed, opinion-culture, we ought to elude our own socialized reflexes. Not all denunciations of orthodoxy evince intolerance: The target is not really a demographic assumed to be inferior, but a technological situation in which “ready-made phrases,” amounting to prefabricated patterns of response, pass eerily from person to person, precluding any serious engagement with thought-feelings for which a society hasn’t yet the words. This is why Proust says books as “the children of silence should have no portion with the children of the word – thoughts that owe their being to a wish to say something, to a disapproval, or an opinion.”Footnote ¹⁷ It isn’t about keeping others out, but the porousness of the modern self to discourses, feeling-states, reaction-patterns, that have become ubiquitous and must be outwitted.

To have (to possess, and as well as to declare) an opinion is to insist on an idea entirely our own – also, by extension, to announce that we are masters of our destinies. (In a sense, every opinion contains, besides its obvious content, these additional opinions as riders.) But the poets I look at feel that when utterance turns urgent, compressed (stylized), and seizes on whatever is at once available to an exacerbated earnestness – when, in other words, we feel inspired – this is when it is most likely that transpersonal forces are speaking through us, and not necessarily the Muses, but more nefarious and mundane interests.

To see selves as identical with opinions is to reverse the discoveries of neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and cultural history, and pretend to wholesale self-understanding. Phrasemaking in earnest, we avow clear aims – really, our reasons for what we say and do are murkier. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas provides an example:

Literary scholarship doesn’t work this way, and I’m not saying it should – still, it’s provoking to encounter (as with Ramanujan and Gunn) a perspective which suggests that not all politicizing is worthy. Percy Bysshe Shelley famously said poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and scholars of literature, even those suspicious of Romantic ideologies, tend to, in practice, continue his claim. One might respond to Bollas, that American foreign policy and global warming really were, are, things to object to. To try to change. So why does it matter where Ben’s feelings come from?

Both psychoanalysts and literary critics postulate how feeling-states arise, and what the shapes they make (behavior-patterns, poems), are really about. I’ll try something else – being curiouser about, to adapt Bollas’s phrasing, “lines of thought.” Poems are undevout, intrinsicate, creaturely (a word important to me) and in a complicated relationship with preparedness. Within their precincts, threads of conviction emerge, evolve, go phut or lastingly incandesce. With perceivable throes, energies hitherto unaligned condense into descriptions of the world. Moving through poems written in many times and places, I examine how claims materialize and become shareable – gravitating toward a conception of the virtual. There are poems discussing “opinion” using the word itself. And poems (not always the same ones) whose forms – syntax, imagery, sound, rhythm – generate statements in a self-conscious and discussable way. My wish, to begin, is to reinvigorate discussions of poetry’s relation to fact, bringing a range of statement-types under the umbrella of “opinion,” since in the post-Romantic poems I discuss, the provisionality of any utterance is always a given.

Here are two quotations: one from a canonical Romantic poem by Keats, the other from the postlyric poetry in prose of Solmaz Sharif. Juxtaposing poems isn’t the same thing as equating them, or annulling their (sometimes minoritized) particularity. If tensions arise, so be it – I don’t presume a power to my own prose, to override the aliveness of these works:

Opinions become a subject for Romantic and post-Romantic poems that allow for the staging of unintelligibility as an aesthetic as well as an interpersonal phenomenon. Sharif’s strophic prose encompasses anaphora (the oppositionality impacted in “whereas,” as it deepens and extends), rhythmic punctuation, jarring speech-tones (defensive sarcasm, for instance) as well as further maneuvers (“clarify” and “proclaimed” share a phoneme, we’re asked to compare and contrast these verbs of utterance). Value-systems collide. How to parse the man’s pronouncement? He says that, were he the person speaking the poem, his opinion wouldn’t change; since they share US citizenship, she ought to share his stance on the detainment and torture of Muslims. His dual and conflicting claim is that (1) he and she are the same, and so she must agree; but also (2), that she is not, constitutively or constitutionally, the same as him, for the minority of which she’s part must accommodate, and not protest, the injustices of the Patriot Act.

Of Keats’s poem, I. A. Richards – elaborating his theory of poetic “pseudostatement” – remarked:

In talking about urns Richards is also talking about poems. It is poems that are meant to “induce states of mind” and not “enunciate philosophical positions.” He isn’t alone here. Cleanth Brooks – centering this poem within New Criticism – says that what the Grecian urn says is “not meant to march out of its context to compete with the scientific and philosophical generalizations which dominate our world.” For J. L. Austin, “any and every utterance” in a poem is “in a peculiar way hollow or void”; Suzanne Langer argues that a poem’s “import” comprises not “the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made”; and for Barbara Herrnstein Smith, while poem-endings, in particular, may achieve a “striking validity,” the “sense of truth that concerns us here is a psychological epiphenomenon and in certain respects illusory.”Footnote ²¹

Discussing poetry and opinion in our disinformation-saturated 21st century – historicizing this post-truth moment – I don’t mean to wholly collapse the literary into the non-literary. But soundbites and misleading headlines, tweets, and policy statements also intertwine form and content: Idioms, syntax, rhythms of assertion both psychological and verbal, that we inherit and disseminate, fuse with the meanings we generate out of uncertainty and shape into contagious claims. Within poems, we see viewpoints coalesce out of world news and mental noise. Reaching the end of Keats’s ode, and the urn’s – as I’m styling it – opinion, we are (no matter what Brooks says) invited to assent or dissent. This is part of the literary experience of reading Keats. So though it’s true that readers extract opinions too readily and crudely from literature, when we scorn them for taking sentences out of context as springboards for scandal, or for isolating as posterizable or Instagrammable affirmations, verse meant to be read ironically (“I took the road less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference”), we forget that poems have always been sprinkled with moments, experiences, of proffered identification with assertive surges.

A culture of argument is metastasizing of print discourse as Keats writes his Ode – postulating of his urn, wishing to learn from it, a world-countering ataraxia. It is under this pressure that a beautiful thing regathers enough of its previous personification as a woman as to “say” something – seeming to intervene. To read Keats’s closing lines, some of the most famous in poetry’s history, in terms of opinion, is to realize that we – “man” – needn’t, perhaps can’t, accept what our “friend” the urn says. The poem ends with the possibility of, if not disagreement, exactly, then possible disunion, concerning the urn that “say’st” and a person who at times feels they exist in the same world of values as the urn, and at other times, that they don’t, and as such might refuse its reassurance with less vigor than regret. Keats was fascinated by opinion: It was against Charles Wentworth Dilke’s addiction to opining that he pitched his idea of negative capability; he also wrote to Richard Woodhouse, “not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can it, when I have no nature?” and, discussing religion with his brother, he describes himself as “straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness – without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion.”Footnote ²²

What I am trying to recover is the cultural background to such feelings. Keats speaks repeatedly of feeling oppressed by crowds to the point of his own identity seeming to vanish, or utter itself brokenly – troping how it feels to be, without one’s consent, absorbed into an emerging mass public.Footnote ²³ Although I reproduce the quotation-marks as they stand in Jack Stillinger’s edition, I consider the last two lines of the Ode as wholly the urn’s: the line-break affirming “that is all” amplifies a voice that would close down endless futile discussion in a heartening way. It is impossible for us ever lastingly to internalize the urn’s words – which still our unease only momently. What it “say’st” is compelling because precarious: just one thing being said, among countless claims; an utterance that can, will, be overpowered by others, but which preserves a power of circulation allowing it to be reactivated “in midst of other woe / Than ours.”

The consciousness susceptible to the urn’s words is so because it is at sea, porous, in the fashion Marion Milner would describe (analyzing herself) in the 20th century: “I would believe implicitly whatever I read in any paper about political affairs, finding it almost impossible to remember to withhold my acceptance of what was said until I had also heard other opinions.”Footnote ²⁴ If this is a neurotic situation, it is also culturally constructed. For Keats, writing over a century before Milner, any power of generalization available to Romantic poetry has already merged with such networks of conflicting and unstable opinion as gridlock the public sphere. But this hypercanonical poem ends on a note of perhaps still misunderstood hope. Manu Samriti Chander:

Chander mentions Kwame Appiah’s idea of cosmopolitan reading, and this Element is written in a similar spirit.

I realize that, like Keats’s urn, I’m saying something easy to disagree with. But I don’t read poems merely to support my own claims; I incorporate them into my prose as challenging presences that may controvert those claims. Should my leaps in space and time offend the historicist, I can only respond – again – that I do not believe my (or their) criticism really has the power to ride roughshod over, cancel, annihilate, poetic specificities. Ramanujan once more:

Poems speak back, they always have done; it is in part our self-importance, our need to privilege our own claims, which has prevented us from reading poems and writing about them in more creative ways.

I’ve overlooked Sharif’s lead-in: “It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me. Exquisite.” Out of this abutment of eros and politics the word “whereas” materializes: to elicit – as I’m trying, with her poetry and that of Keats – a connection that is not an equivalence. What discommodes Richards, Brooks, Austin and Langer is the contiguity of literary and non-literary language. These things touch, but where and how, and should this liaison be prevented or encouraged? Sharif’s poetry in prose invokes that bridge between the personal and the political which, often taken for granted, it is our creative task as citizens as well as readers to construct. Keats describes the Grecian urn as, in its elusiveness, a “still unravish’d bride”; he turns a thing into a woman, sexualizing an act of interpretation that is also the epitome of aesthetic experience. Sharif considers how a woman of color turns an exotic, aestheticized “thing” in her lover’s eyes, or – denied her rights – under the gaze of a racist state. (The Latin, exquisitus, means both sought out, much to be desired and selected especially – Sharif writes as someone singled out in different ways.) Returning to Richards, let’s frame it this way: Women aren’t supposed (according to the objectifying gaze) to “enunciate” political or “philosophical positions,” only “induce states of mind in their beholders.” The relationship of beauty to truth – as processed by masculine assumptions in multiple realms – is ingeniously reframed.

In a book of essays edited by Charles Bernstein in 1990 – The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, drawn from papers presented at the Wolfson Center in New York – Rosmarie Waldrop explains:

This is a familiar idea, but I turn to Waldrop since she connects the sort of thing that poets and scholars critique, with assumptions within their own practice that go unquestioned. She notices men – including poets and theorists – exaggerating their potency; astonished by Shelley’s phrase about “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” she prefers to consider “poets (and readers) something like the unacknowledged life maintenance crew of the mind”:

Poetry still “has social relevance,” “questions, resists,” and “can make the culture aware of itself, unveil hidden structures.”Footnote ²⁸ But for Waldrop, its power is garbled – not furthered – by overweening opinions about it.

Waldrop’s poetry, which has, over the years, also turned toward prose, conveys, she says, “the feeling that I never have enough information.”Footnote ²⁹ She’s mindful of how we tend to orbit the same, cozy concerns: “like everyone we adjust / to just those questions / we choose to see / … driven by some force again / and again / to the same sentences.” Often, she depicts a conversation between a voice coded as male and unequivocal (or, suspiciously strident in its protestations of negative capability) – “You told me, if something is not used it is meaningless”; “your father stomps into the room and demands you listen” – and a female voice revaluing its own waverings: “should it worry me that thought, in my sentences, seems never wholly present at any one moment?”Footnote ³⁰ The accent, the averting emphasis, is on “should”: If the logic of opinion is that words and thoughts can entirely and impressively coincide, Waldrop shows what is possible, personally and politically, to language scanting such triumphs. To “worry,” here, is to ruminate, but also to inhabit the problem, gnawing at it like a dog at a bone:

I’m reminded of a poem called “Real Life” by the Canadian poet Karen Solie, about women’s gestures limited by what men make of them. Including the moment of the apprehension of beauty, that was everything to Keats – seeing “something beautiful,” a “woman / thinks that if ever there were a time / to fall on her knees, this is it; / but doesn’t, seeing that it’s mid-morning / and the street full of bachelors.”Footnote ³² Waldrop’s poem’s set at night, not in the exposing daylight – in what seems a private, not a public space. But in it, too, a woman fears that whatever she says will be heard as an attempt to “seduce,” perhaps with figures as in metaphors, but more than that with “the naked figure” that is herself. As such, she won’t codify her discoveries into peevish claims.

My interest is in poems that don’t take for granted leaps between reading and writing and politics, but consider carefully our tendency to conflate opining (spoken, or written) with real-world change. Solmaz Sharif, for instance, also contends with male power-fantasies – domineering lovers and assaults on human rights tally with connections between utterance and legislation, literature and life. Setting the world to rights is what we say of merely self-arousing verbiage. But when it turns out that the man’s wife “helped draft the PATRIOT Act,” we realize he isn’t just “proclaiming” emptily. Real harm is being done: In this context, double meanings and counterintuitive word-choices (“disappeared”) aren’t functions of aesthetic play. As horrifying as this is, it reveals words and actions, opinion and policy, at a moment of union – for both the oppressor and the resister. As such, Sharif’s poem, though it might seem conscientiously rebarbative, persistently unsettling, is also, like Keats’s urn and Keats’s poem about it, reassuring. Although she goes on to include the line “I made nothing happen,” alluding to W. H. Auden’s famous in-poem claim, that “poetry makes nothing happen,” Sharif has provided a situation where speech and, by extension, poetry aren’t posturing but momentous. Where methods of oppression can be grasped, the activist-position becomes available, and although the state of the nation may be alarming, we are liberated from the fear that our opinions, our poems, our opining about poems and about politics are sound and fury signifying nothing.

Though Percy Shelley’s republicanism was a thousand miles from the sort of Republicanism to which Sharif objects, I think of Matthew Arnold’s description of him: “in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”Footnote ³³ For Waldrop,

This elusiveness is a potential scandal for activism and dreams of revolution. In the poems I’m concerned with (because they concern me, with the accent on “concern,” not “me”), writing that “uncovers possibilities,” in Waldrop’s phrase, also explores moments of “codification.” It is a political poetics, but suspicious of such grandstanding as opinion-culture tends to inculcate.

By the mid to late 19th century, Victorian writers were already near-obsessed by that “borderline between private and public” experience – insisting on it in gendered terms. For Coventry Patmore (in his poem The Angel in the House, finalized in 1862) it was a woman’s task to – as a good wife – create against the realm, red in tooth and claw, of economic competition, into which husbands plunge for the sake of their families, a counterworld of soothing privacy. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” insists, famously, on spousal bliss – “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” – against a wider world “swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,” where, it feels, there is no “joy,” “love,” “light,” “peace, nor help for pain,” but also no (my emphasis) “certitude.”Footnote ³⁵ Arnold’s prose also turns toward gender when distinguishing opinion from truth:

This preface to the second, 1869 edition of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism genders the public and private spheres: Male opining must expunge its inherent violence, if it is to be rescued into the – intermittent, barely glimpsed, and never to be consummated – presence of idealized female truth.

Deeply influenced by Sainte-Beuve, Arnold wishes to fuse literary taste and social manners. Admiring Burke for going back on his own opinion about the French Revolution – “If a great change is to be made in human affairs,” says Burke, “the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way” – Arnold brings in the language of industrialization (the “steam-engine”), going beyond, I think, the standard Romantic contrast between the organic and the mechanical, in suggesting a technological origin for contemporary blinkeredness:

How does one oppose oppositionality? “Every time we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion,” writes Arnold, we rediscover within ourselves, are enthralled by, “the eternal spirit of the Populace” – that mass public he feared and wished to civilize.Footnote ³⁸ One of his answers was “an institution like the French academy,” providing “a force of educated opinion, checking and rebuking those who fall below these standards, or who set them at nought.”Footnote ³⁹

“Dover Beach” is a lyric which approaches rhetoric, or that which John Stuart Mill, twenty or so years prior – in 1833 – called “eloquence,” distinguishable from poetry since it “supposes an audience.” An audience such as Sharif imagines within the “2004 Republican National Convention.” Wondering if she, or her speaker, are outside protesting that convention, we might understand this experimental, 21st-century poem in prose in terms of a long-standing post-Romantic debate about how poetry and opining interact, or don’t. How can poetry avoid succumbing to the terms of the debate, and seeing things entirely in power’s existing terms? For Mill,

Mill also believed, according to David Russell, in

This is an idea now tough to believe in, given successes of disinformation on a global scale. The conditions for “rational debate” seem harder and harder to recover and reinvigorate, and the combat-model, where opinions collide and truth wins out, appears utopian. Russell finds Mill’s earlier writing

Mill succumbs, that is, as we have in the 21st century, where “forms of controversy” spread virally, our reflexes turn bellicose, and much contemporary, experimental poetry chooses to reassert itself as poetry (embracing the scandal, often, of using prose), at the very crossroads where the conditions for persuasion break down. “The conditions for argument do not exist,” writes Robert Fogelin, when there is “a clash in underlying principles.” What he calls “deep disagreement” corresponds to what is popularly understood as today’s political polarization.Footnote ⁴²

Again, this situation is often understood as unique to here and now – a diagnosis glamorizing our technocentury as uniquely transformative, and keeping affect circulating through a thousand think-pieces. (Sam Kriss: “one of the things the internet likes is essays about how awful and unprecedented the internet really is.”)Footnote ⁴³ But it was already felt in the 19th century that the conditions for meaningful debate were being overtaken by sheer animus. John Edward Taylor, founding the Guardian following the Peterloo massacre of 1819, felt pressed to explain of the paper’s opinions that “even our political opponents shall admit the propriety of the spirit in which they are written, however fundamentally they may differ from their own principles and views.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He is trying to postulate some kind of common ground, without which meaningful disputation isn’t possible. Politics had invaded the domicile, as newspapers cancelled any division between public and private space. It was in truth – writes Wordsworth, of 1790s France where revolutionary violence was horrifically actualized, not just incessantly talked about – “an hour / Of universal ferment – mildest men / Were agitated, and commotions, strife / Of passion and opinion, filled the walls / Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.”Footnote ⁴⁵ William Blake, writing at the same time in England under government clampdown, devised in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell a form of poetic prose alert to entrenched oppositionality; energized by, as well as analytical of, a reactiveness enraptured by its own ferity –

John Villalobos finds “a critique and parody of proverbial wisdom, a biblical genre that came under close critical scrutiny in the years following the Puritan Interregnum.”Footnote ⁴⁷ I consider the irreversible degradation of maxims into challengeable opinions, in the Romantic period, in the next section of this Element. For the moment, it’s enough to say that, writing the proverbs of hell, Blake stresses the existence of radically different understandings of the world, that as a result can’t communicate. Noting that “the sayings used in a nation, mark its character,” his transnational perspective (he’s thinking about both the French and American Revolutions) reveals the cultural as well as creaturely origins of what would be abstract universal truths. That his poetics of contrariety arises of his times is something we might track through his ornery marginalia, as when he rails at an “opinion” belonging to Joshua Reynolds as “a Lie & a Deceit,” or annotates Lavater’s aphorisms in a manner recalling today’s upvotes and clapbacks. (Coleridge, among many, shared in this practice, filling the margins of books with objections.)

I don’t mean to blur disparate events. But our current understandings of technology, politics, and poetics tend to obscure commonalities – or, intertextual zones of resonance and dissonance, which a juxtapositional criticism may apprehend. It’s not, then, that Blake got there first, but that comparable tensions pushed him toward comparably hybrid forms. Consider the migrational poetics of the Trinidadian writer Anthony Vahni Capildeo, now resident in Scotland. I quote from “Transatlantic,” in their sequence “Winter to Winter”:

Blake, too, begins with simplicities – “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” – before revealing his writing to proceed from a riven milieu. When opinions are fixed in a word-pattern, either orally transmitted or preserved on the page, one step they may take toward the condition of knowledge is to become proverbs. Except we associate proverbs with organic communities reposing on shared values. Capildeo aspires to an ethics of listening; they write of precarious precincts where views otherwise unintelligible can, just about, be expressed. The idea experimented with is that a grievance is something one “has,” traumatic to live with but a possession nevertheless: Psychological baggage is also psychological luggage. Capildeo tests the intelligibility of trauma, risking incoherence in trying to get things across to a reader ensnared by their own situation. Immanuel Kant’s subjective universal has it that, saying an artwork’s beautiful, we, more than meaning by this merely that we like the poem, actually “believe ourselves to be speaking with a universal voice, and lay claim to the concurrence of everyone” – it is a characteristically Romantic, dissensus-acknowledging and dissensus-healing, idea.Footnote ⁴⁹ For Capildeo, not “everyone” will understand: This is poetry by someone who has frequently failed to make themselves understood; a historical encounter, for those of us for whom “swords crossed on the walls of museums” explain why we live in one country rather than another, or why, in our daily lives, we’re subject to injury. The language of militarism – “pressed into service” – is ironized by poetry that identifies, and identifies with, a community of the wounded while avoiding a futilely rigid stance of counteraggression.

Considering Mill on “eloquence,” we might relate the prose turn in late 20th- and 21st-century poetry to the difficulty for poets of even temporarily discarding polemical modes (the genre of prophecy, that enabled Blake, being no longer feasible). Found prose can be reframed and newly scrutinized – revealed as fissured and biased – in poetic space. Or a prose poem can activate the connection between prose and speech. Harryette Mullen exposes in “Elliptical” forms of (probably) white opining, about (it seems) Black people:

The final snippet’s telling, since the only attempt to interact with the maligned out-group fails: This poem, like Sharif’s Look, arises of an intersubjective impasse. Austin Allen’s analysis is mostly persuasive:

I would emphasize that “grand opinions” of this sort involve the recirculation of a pre-existing language. Mullen’s real target is the rhetoric by which – returning to Samuel Johnson – (white) opinion seeks to (pretend to) “improve itself into knowledge.” Terms like “empathy” and maybe even “contempt” aren’t appropriate: We’re considering how an opinion-structure maintains itself, making available to prejudicial assertiveness a range of idioms. There are no genuine shifts in tone: Every utterance cleaves to the same register, with moments of hesitation and qualification there not to defuse but augment white spleen and white discursive authority. We may imagine a speaker, or speakers, congested with feeling – seeking through words self-stabilizing postures; responding to, looking into the eyes of, another person, with phrases materializing in their mouth. But this is an experimental poem vexing that idea of the unitary self which Allen presupposes. For where do these phrases come from, and is the person voicing them really in control?

Sleeping with the Dictionary was published in 2002. Mullen’s prose poem, working within, and twisting, an Anglo-American tradition that associates poetry with speech, suggests a broader crisis to do with authority, voicing and print. Picturing ourselves as fused to our opinions – and taking others as identical with theirs – we lend to technologically and politically splintered selves a spurious integrity. In the twenty years since this poem appeared, poetry and social media ecologies have completely merged, with works posted online tied to the presence, the likeability or opposite, of their authors. The activist poet – performance-based or otherwise – erases Mill’s distinction between “poetry” and “eloquence,” addressing their audience directly, “courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief.” “One line of thought, and one that has tended to dominate since the early nineteenth century,” writes Eric Falci, “is that a poem is the emanation of a subject.”Footnote ⁵² Like an opinion. Poetry both reflects and refracts our habits of exaggeration. And if the best kind of heightening, and intensification of language comes, as Wordsworth claimed, of passion, then poems are curious as to where drives originate, and how they can be furthered or deformed. What happens to psychological impulsions when they go public in verbal forms?

Besides affirming a longer history for what isn’t a purely 21st-century problem, I resist the tendency of opinion-cultures in the United States – which include those of professionalized scholarship – to understand everything in local and sometimes exceptionalist terms. I’ll consider as a corrective the poetry of Sean Bonney and John Forbes. Bonney writes in England and in the aftermath of the 2011 Tottenham riots following the shooting of Mark Duggan. This was also the year of Occupy Wall Street, the Egyptian revolution, and the Arab Spring: the high-point of social media envisioned as a means of grassroots organization. Bonney examines the word “opinion” in both lineated verse and poetry in prose (forms he designates “letters”), relating contemporary British politics to Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the Eighties and her cult of personality continuing into the present. John Forbes is writing in Australia in the Eighties and Nineties, about trends, opinion polls, and the Treasurer (and later Prime Minister) Paul Keating, whose coat-trailing opinions played brilliantly on television and the radio.

Like media politics, post-Romantic lyric embraces performances of sincerity. Treating opinion in both its individual and collective forms, Forbes examines how Keating and others present themselves, and how we respond to these presentations of self:

Forbes isn’t happy about, besides world events, consumer trends (fashion, and tanning) – it isn’t possible to be happy, he suggests elsewhere, “as long as happiness wears her hair / in a page-boy bob, / has opinions about things / & looks askance at your shoes.” With Keatsian rather than Keatingesque ambition, he writes an “Ode to Doubt,” and, elegizing the poet Robert Harris, imagines a poetic afterlife above and beyond false certainties, gossip, and possessiveness: “others have armchairs / & opinions about things // but you sing a song like / the clinking of schooners // the city’s still hearing / when they’re dead & gone.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The poems I’ve block-quoted, however, see no easy escape from other people’s opinions, one’s own propensity to opine, and fluctuations of opinion within a media-bewildered electorate. Considering how the verb to have functions in Forbes’s elegy for Harris, and in “Melbourne,” I notice an ongoing, from poem to poem, inquiry into the consequences of having to voice one’s opinion, which also means the demand to have opinions in the first place. Returning to David Russell:

Although Russell’s focus is 19th-century Britain, this applies to Forbes’s view of late 20th-century Australia, where one’s need to be heard, to self-position, is redirected toward trivialities (“where fashion is argued for”); where relations require, in the image from a cartoon, voices that “merge” before the people who supposedly originate them have met. For – in this light – utterances don’t arise from self-authoring persons, but are emitted by cultural scripts beyond our choosing. As Gig Ryan puts it, Forbes rejects “an outdated paradigm of a unified subject transcending time and economics.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In this sense, existing in late capitalist Australia means inhabiting, at risk, a weather-system of unplaceable and dangerously adrift feeling-states. “Your opinions / have to change a lot, like the weather but more / deliberately” – the second line-break produces a peculiar emphasis. We often break the ice with an opinion about the weather (Derozio: “the weather, I must admit, is an exhaustless subject; you may first remark that it is very sultry or very pleasant, as the case may be …”).Footnote ⁵⁷ Weather exceeds our control; to do something “deliberately” is to take control; but “have to” bespeaks compulsion, only indicating choice in the sense of adaptation to circumstances. “Deliberately” can also mean slowly, ponderously, rather than volitionally: It could be that one has to be seen to change one’s opinions or have them changed, and in a certain rhythm. A performance of open-mindedness. Examining how people meet, get along, pressure each other – “shaping these identities to begin with” – Forbes scales things up, as “thousands of separate / people” merge into an “ephemeral electorate.”

“Toposthesia” returns to and revises the image of the speech-bubble in extremis: “the fragile temper of our acts / breaks like a bubble from the drowning mouth.” The rhetorical device of toposthesia describes, conjures into being, a fictional place: Forbes chooses a displaced perspective over a clear (and, it would seem, impossible) description of the nation. Ken Bolton: “John looks at representations, makes representations, considers all art to do so, and he examines them. Not only does he consider art as making representations but politics, philosophy, the culture generally – advertising, sport, national myths, TV, genres.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Do the speaker’s beliefs align with those “in the distant farms and villages”? Descriptions of reality become reductive, coercive, fantastical, when deformed, or outright generated by the will to power. But we also look to poems for pictures of what is going on that will help us survive what is going on: Forbes experiments with offbeat ways of persuading oneself and others of the existence of agency.

“Toposthesia” chooses evocation over mimesis: that “opinion poll … left out for months / in the weather” scorns any attempt at contingency-proofed and error-free measurement of a nation’s diversely subjective commitments. The poll believes in, seeks to materialize as data, public opinion issuing coherently and singularly from the public sphere grasped as a totality. Yet as Evan Stewart and Douglas Hartmann observe, sociologists since Habermas “have largely been skeptical of the concept, seeing it as a crude aggregation of discrete attitudes conditioned by larger structural forces, rather than a reliable measure of emergent attitudes from the citizenry.”Footnote ⁵⁹ And for Steven Poole, writing in 2025, opinion polls are not “simply useless” but “actively harmful: a species of misinformation … part of the machinery behind the ‘manufacture of consent,’ a phrase originally coined by [Walter] Lippmann to describe the propaganda operations of politicians and the press.”Footnote ⁶⁰ They can – when coverage becomes partisan – become hostage to an “anchorman’s opinions,” or the boasts of politicians: “We’ve got the numbers & the swing to prove it!” The “jar of marbles” in “The Numbers” brings to mind counted votes, accumulated wealth, a “shining / & translucent” objectivity. It echoes the idiom losing your marbles – Forbes writes of a nation losing its mind – and counters mediaspeak with poetic allusion.

For while I wonder if Forbes has Yeats – central to my next section – on his mind (“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” mentions “public opinion ripening so long / We thought it would outlive all future days”), Wallace Stevens steps in more clearly to balance local and transnational emphases.Footnote ⁶¹ “In Canberra,” writes Forbes, “there’s a jar of marbles”; here’s Stevens, and his “Anecdote of the Jar” –

Stevens’s jar descends from Keats’s well-wrought urn: an aesthetic presence reconfiguring the world around it. I’ve reassessed Keats’s poem in terms of a public sphere where utterances incessantly and annihilatingly collide. Forbes’s “jar of marbles,” like his opinion-poll, aspires to a definitive representation. Poetic tradition is invoked but Forbes, unlike Stevens (but very like Bonney, who I’m coming to), sees poems as not redemptive of, but potentially collusive with, cultural confusions. Unlike writers who self-aggrandize by linking subversions of syntax to political subversion, he isn’t smug about overlaps between how poetry functions, or is said to, and how politicians mystify us. He’s agonized – feels complicitous. Both the politician and the anchorman present a façade: What hides behind their curated (ideally unstained by “soya sauce”) performances of personality? Forbes writes stained, creaturely, investigative poems that sometimes endorse and sometimes controvert the desire to make sense of things by arranging words compellingly.

Writing in The Canberra Times, Alex Millmow described Paul Keating as “a verbal spellbinder,” whose “ability to coin a phrase to describe problems afflicting the economy would leave lesser mortals groping for words.”Footnote ⁶³ Here is Forbes’s poem about him, “Watching the Treasurer”:

Meaghan Morris analyzes this poem in detail, stressing Keating’s provocative style:

Saying Keating’s “world is / Like a poem,” Forbes doesn’t irresponsibly vaunt the power of literature, but brings media politics and poetry together as examples of language-in-performance. The astonishing simile about Keating’s lower lip alludes to the power of his rhetoric to affect the market – after the stanza break. Prior to which, it seems only a snappy joke at Keating’s expense, siphoning his own style: the poetic equivalent of a quip, a punchline, the sort of reductive soundbite that politicians and pundits trade in. Economic “necessity” turns out to, in Forbes’s rhetoric, disguise “what rich Americans want”: that line and stanza division is especially acidic, it has a performance quality akin to Keating’s. The same applies to the wordplay on “act”: The poem’s tone veers, it is withering as well as, or prior or subsequent to, being nuancing. Its postures partake of opinion-culture: Forbes can only talk about the situation from “inside.”

“Australians,” writes Morris, laughed “at an airhead Ronald Reagan, and at … “the ‘sex appeal’ of Mrs Thatcher, and at infantile English obsessions with schoolmarms, knickers and canes, but in the image of this tall, dark, saturnine man there was something, not similar (no elocution lessons for Keating) but comparable.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The media politician operates within, exploits, the space between opinion and policy – activating archetypes of potency. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, both social and legacy media debated ferociously the correct response for those whose lives she ruined. Sean Bonney’s “Letter on Harmony and Sacrifice,” dated January 31, 2011, anticipated the situation, querying the role of metaphor in understanding politics:

The 2011 riots are inexplicable, for the person speaking – writing a “letter,” in prose nearing galvanized, even paranoid, speech – except in terms of Thatcher’s decimation of England’s social fabric in the Eighties. Bonney’s “Letters” appear in a book of poetry, alongside lineated verse. They’re an example of – returning to Mill – both “feeling confessing itself to itself” and “feeling pouring itself forth to other minds.” Mentioning conversations, the voice in the letters seeks another. But how, when “understanding” itself is imperilled? Claims emerge abruptly and compellingly, of a baseline turbidity (“it seems to me, sometimes”) varied by spikes of diagnostic illumination. Margaret Thatcher, like Paul Keating, is more than a person in the public eye: She’s an event, a sensibility, a brand, an ideational matrix. When she died in 2013 (another “Letter” mentions it) the trope of the “frail old woman” was indeed activated in newspapers and parliamentary speeches to soften her legacy.

A “temporal seizure” isn’t quite a temporal lobe seizure, a brain-event connected with epilepsy, and so mappable onto the “bourgeois mind.” “Temporal seizure,” “magnetosphere,” and “radio signature” approach the lexis of science fiction: “they can hear it on fucking Saturn.” Do the accents of explication – “of course” – construct a voice sure of itself and its message, or are they attempts by that voice to (as in Mullen’s prose poem) repel uncertainties? When we cease to trust in authorities, alternative, sometimes deranged, rhetorics of explication arise and spread. In the words of Byung-Chul Han:

The voice in Bonney’s “Letters” is post-rhetorical: Hating being lectured to, it comes up with its own explanations. (Blake: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans.”)Footnote ⁶⁹ The letter sounds like, and knows it does – which it also knows is no solution – conspiracist ranting.

The problem for Bonney as for Forbes is that existing discourse cannot apprehend, let alone resist, the forces his Acknowledgements page designates “those vampires of capital who continue to dictate the terms of our lives.” The terms of our lives, and language-forms both outside literature and within it: “Here’s a statistic for you, a class metaphor, an elegant little metric foot: not one police officer in the UK has been convicted for a death in police custody since 1969.”Footnote ⁷⁰ To repeat: In this situation, Mill’s distinction doesn’t obtain.

Letters Against the Firmament also contains The Commons, a sonnet sequence (if you look closely, the poems have fourteen lines) in three parts, concerning the dream of a shared physical and mental space. (The idea, that is, behind the idea of the opinion as commonplace.) The problem is that the thoughts we have aren’t truly our own, and the things we say repeat tabloid lies. William Rowe describes the “Letters” as offering “no stopping-place for thought, no ideas in which one could find release from the dire need for change and its continued impossibility”; Jacob Bard-Rosenberg describes Bonney’s “symbolism in which all knowingness has been supplanted with fury and its movements.”Footnote ⁷¹ In The Commons, opinions are stopping places thought is allured by, a bad knowingness always tantalizingly on offer:

The Commons ends with the residual glow of the dispossessed: “we are inside / your opinions / your membranes flashing / we are compliant & broken / we are gardens of silence.”Footnote ⁷² Written following the 2011 protests, Bonney’s book speaks to the failure of collective action in the streets, and also to corporate takeovers of online activism.

To sing like a canary means giving information to the police, whose “computer” is busy “making metonyms” – substituting words by association, such as criminal for minority. “Singing like thrushes” sounds better (it suits a lyric poem), but, as we’ve seen, Bonney, like Forbes, links poetic technique to the bureaucratic reshaping of reality. “We” have no counterweapon but a language subordinated to consumerism to the point of resembling a “graveyard” of “used opinions.” “Grazing,” with a line-break after it, is visually and sonically tethered to “explanation” – an act which this poem and my Element see as potentially needy, uncontrolled, baneful, rather than truly illuminating. The assonance connecting these words urges, also, the extraction from “grazing” of all possible meanings: nourishment; injury; a collision or a moment of contact that hasn’t quite occurred. It could be a metaphor for how persons subsist, not thrive, in a technologized public sphere — alternating between states of solipsistic enclosure and destabilizing overinvolvement, while data-driven fact, supplanting any humane conception of subjective knowledge, is routinely idealized yet remains endlessly manipulable prior to personal or communal understanding. (The Rule of “Seven” in statistics suggests that when a series of seven consecutive data points appear either above or below the mean average, something is out of whack.)

We relate mindlessly, viscerally, with but a ticklish agitation of the social membrane: Bonney affirms the, as I’m putting it, creaturely dimension to opinion-culture, describing citizens as animals grazing on the commons, but also – horrifically – on each other. In this sense we are all emotional “vampires” consuming each other’s affective existence, passively in thrall to the machine that processes a myriad thought-feelings for easy consumption. Or: we’re cattle raised for the slaughter and given our own to digest. This is how the “sickness” of mad cow disease, as it was called, came about in the United Kingdom in the Eighties and Nineties, but the metaphor of cannibalism also belongs with zero-sum capitalist discourse (it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there) and reaches back as far as Shakespeare and his visions of society wholly disordered – in Troilus and Cressida, for instance, where “everything includes itself in power, / Power into will, will into appetite, / And appetite, an universal wolf,” will at “last eat up himself.”Footnote ⁷³

Bonney sees radical anger rerouted by algorithms into reservoirs of affect siphonable by capital. I first drafted this section in the autumn of 2024, following rioting in England and Ireland by the far-right which was inflamed by social media and was hardly revolutionary; we might also consider, in the United States, the assault of Trump supporters on the Capitol. Although I would like to believe there is a fundamental difference between such things and protest movements like Black Lives Matter or the 2022 Aragalaya in Sri Lanka, we may have entered an era where, whenever public opinion gathers to a crescendo and is actualized on the streets, it cannot be contained within, defined by, wholly characterized in terms of, a coherent politics. As Michael Eigen put it two decades ago:

Elon Musk tweeted that “civil war” in England was inevitable. His takeover of Twitter hastened a shift in the perception of social media, which in 2011 seemed to digitally incarnate Bonney’s dreamed “commons.” It is time to think differently about dialogue, democracy, and our addiction to opining – which hasn’t had the democratizing effect we assumed (as more voices have their say), but has caused discourse to degenerate, repeatedly, into violence.

“Tis You Speak, That’s Your Error”: Hopkins, Browning, Clough, Yeats, Frost, Auden, de Souza

I hope to track out of Victorian poetry and into the 20th century – reading poems by Browning, Hopkins, Clough, Yeats, Frost, and Auden, before turning to the Indian poet Eunice de Souza – a post-Romantic poetics of speech unsure how worldly it wishes to be.

The dramatic monologue emerges in times of disputation and doubt (about God, morality, and more) – a poetics of manifold clashing voices. When any truth seems perspectival – only your, their, or my, truth – it can be countermanded by anyone else’s. Cornelia Pearsall’s monograph on Tennyson, who arguably invented the form, emphasizes in it “the resources of suasive speech.” She also says that if “a significant critical occupation, from the earliest appearance of any of these poems, has been uncovering which beliefs articulated by the speakers are those of the poet,” this is a “metaphoric fallacy”: “rather than being identical with a poet’s views, we might instead insist that the views of a dramatic speaker can only be like the views of the poet.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Again, we see that critics are obsessed with extracting from poems the opinions of their authors; perhaps it is the temptation of every dramatic monologue, to have its reader compare the persona with the poet in this way. Yet what exactly would we achieve, should we discover exactly Tennyson felt about a given issue; how would we use this knowledge; why do we wish so fervently to exchange the experience of his poetry for it? The dramatic monologue has much to tell us about post-Romantic cultures of opinion, and the lengths to which readers, poets, and scholars are willing to go in arguing for a solid, clearly defined, empirically observable self defined by consistent beliefs. If, as Herbert Tucker puts it, “the self of a dramatic monologue … is the most elaborate illusion of the text, the product of a speech act and not its producer,” I would say that those of Robert Browning in particular have us consider our extraliterary selves as also, in a sense, virtual – increasingly (this remains a historical argument) dependent for their outline and momentum on the verbal stances we emit, or which pass through us.

I’ll begin with another opinion on opinions (and verse style), a remark made by Gerard Manley Hopkins to Richard Watson Dixon, about Browning:

Browning, who seems to contain multitudes, is reimagined as anything but. Though the speakers of his poems range through history, for Hopkins the poet himself is too much of his time, an overexplainer resembling, perhaps, not only Charles Kingsley and his school of so-called muscular Christianity, but sages like Ruskin and Carlyle. And also bombastic editorializing, since Matthew Rubery reminds us of the Victorian caricature of the journalist who’ll write for any party, and, asked for his politics, replies, “Bread and cheese, sir.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hopkins does pinpoint the difficulties which arise when Browning’s monologues seek to suggest others beside the speaker in the room. But he’s also talking about Victorian doubt and, its secret sharer, an addiction to elucidating and expounding.

One objection would be, that Hopkins describes (for example) the Duke in “My Last Duchess,” not Browning himself; the author is equated with the opinions of his characters, as in furors today. Hopkins, knowing he is, himself, being obstreperous, overrides this sensed objection by including it in parenthesis, matching how Browning talks with how he makes “his people talk.” The ironic distance by which the dramatic monologue transforms the earnest speech of Romantic lyric seems to collapse. But it’s also as if people in monologues are as real as interlocutors at one’s table, shouted down by a man spluttering out pieces of bread and cheese. As if Browning weren’t just browbeating the reader, but compelling those people to talk (Hopkins’s own reservations about publication may be relevant). All Browning’s characters do, Hopkins suggests, is nully opine; their talk is but reaction, a try at stopping other people talking.

Hopkins inhabits and satirizes the bread-and-cheese voice in a small, scarcely studied poem sent to Robert Bridges within a bunch of triolets. These jokey experiments turn an antiquated form toward newspaper-language: that enormous combined noise, of information and opinion and commerce, consolidating at this time. One satirizes advertisements – “When you ask for Cockle’s Pills, / Beware of spurious imitations” – another is about reading The Times. About, even, becoming addicted to the news, aligning one’s moods with the vicissitudes of opinion-culture. As it was increasingly experienced as “an essential part of everyday life,” writes Rubery, Victorians entered “their own version of today’s twenty-four-hour news cycle … contemporaneity was the watchword of over 150 newspapers” to call themselves the “Times”:

“Men think, and speak, and act the Times newspaper,” wrote Anthony Trollope; and Joseph Conrad: “the printed page of the Press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Hopkins’s triolet thinks this through. Modernizations of historical verse-forms, following the Romantic shift toward a poetics of heightened speech, find repetition something to be disguised or inventively justified. When lyrics separate from song (although Hopkins made moves in the other direction, scoring poems like sheet-music), refrains require repurposing. In print, iteration is superfluous; if a poem now depicts someone talking, why say the same thing over and over?Footnote ⁸⁰ So Hopkins turns the triolet toward satire. He derides conformity and considers – following the Industrial Revolution, and demographic changes – the psychological texture of urban lives (the man isn’t really “ploughing his way,” his “labour” is different). Hopkins writes of citified, up-to-date individuals whose overconsumption of news may style itself as moral character, but is really an attempt, nearing a compulsion (“must”), to maintain social capital. And since Rubery describes the news as, for Victorians, a “daily ritual,” Hopkins, a Jesuit, may also be worried about the wrong kind of ritualizing consciousness becoming dominant – impulses belonging to Catholicism have been coopted, with the press taking over the role of religion (from the Latin, “to bind together”) in creating communities.Footnote ⁸¹

“To see if what they say / … is correct.” Nothing can be taken for granted; claims must be verified; but claims must also be made, fastuous finalities are the order of the day – thus enters the bread-and-cheese voice. Another of Hopkins’s triolets scrutinizes Wordsworth’s aphorism from his lyric beginning “My heart leaps up when I behold” – “The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety” – which reappeared as the epigraph to his “Immortality” Ode:

The fun is in Wordsworth’s own repetition of the phrase – the use of a self-citation (making authoritative what he previously wrote) as an epigraph to his second, better-known, poem, itself concerned with iteration (“the Pansy at my feet / Doth the same tale repeat”).Footnote ⁸³ Mocking Wordsworth’s masculinist talk of fathers and sons by turning his statement into an inactive breast one can neither “suck” milk nor “sense” from, Hopkins plays expertly with speech-tones to justify his form’s redundancies. We hear that Victorian voice standing up from table, insisting on no “blasted nonsense,” demurring, mocking; exclaiming, penultimately, Wordsworth’s line with baffled disdain, and confirming itself by disconfirming the Romantic poet’s claim to prophetic authority. Refusing to differentiate the claims within Wordsworth’s poem from those made at the dinner-table, in newsprint, or in parliament, Hopkins abandons the distinction between literary and extraliterary statements. The joke may be on the speaker for not realizing the difference, but the triolet’s prescient in acknowledging the overlap of these modes for a modern, reactive, networked consciousness. Within a poetry that, following Wordsworth’s turn to “the real language of men,” sees itself as impassioned speech; as, in Hopkins’s own phrasing, the “current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself” – any statement can be dismissed as just someone’s opinion.Footnote ⁸⁴

Here is a problem to do with the performance of sincere speech within Romantic and post-Romantic lyric poetry. Isobel Armstrong writes of Browning that for him

But since a poet’s expressiveness, unlike, say, a painter’s, uses words, this truth must arise of the denotative and connotative meanings of those words. If it isn’t that of the speakers in Browning’s dramatic monologues, maybe it resides in his contradiction through irony of what they say? If a poem is no longer song but an utterance in “the real language of men,” it’s in the nature of such utterances to make propositions, to give an account of the world open to disagreement. Such is the bind Hopkins outlines in his letter to Dixon. His triolet isn’t a solidly ironic dramatic monologue – he isn’t aloofly deconstructing a grouchily empirical matter-of-factness (the Gradgrind voice, as Dickens might put it), but showing how ubiquitous, unavoidable, it has become. This voice dominates both literary and worldly domains, aching to reinstate “the immediate social order.”

Hopkins’s triolet turns a musical form into a congeries of speech-tones. Song becomes (jumbled, ornery) speech. What are the responsibilities of poetic speech amid unshared values, where impassioned feeling may arrive of traditional subjects, but also of the pressing need to state, promulgate, safeguard, one’s claims? On one occasion, Browning starts a poem with exactly the sort of bellicose intrusion that, for Hopkins, too thoroughly conditioned both his poetics, and wider discourse:

This is an argument about argument: Post-Romantic poetry can’t just dismiss the origin of lyric in song, but senses a residual pull from that direction, to be repudiated within poems themselves. (Robert Frost, who I’ll turn to, goes so far as to say that poetry “ought to fight being set to music if it’s got expression in it.”)Footnote ⁸⁷ Browning reimagines, displacing it in time and place, the sensorial flood of 19th-century disputation as a perceivable music of overlapping voices:

Since the melodic lines in a fugue are referred to as voices, Browning can stylize their jostling and braiding as an argument. Doing so, he registers three things: the origin of poetry in song; the fact that, being made of words, a poem includes statements that activate instincts toward evaluation; finally, he allegorizes not only the doubt-riddled agnosticism of his generation, but the battleground of opinion that culture has become.

Is it that argument only enters poetry in a virtualized – a musical – form, as voicing is caught between militancy and melopoeia? Or is the more disturbing reading possible: that extraliterary debates about matters of moment are no less virtual than poetry? Given distortion and disinformation, but also our creaturely existence as evaluative beings whose claims express unconscious energies and group-dynamics – “animal music” is how Ted Hughes puts it.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such is the concept of the virtual I’m working toward, and will articulate more fully at the end of this Element.

Browning’s rhyming stanzas stand in a quasi-mimetic relation to Hugues’s fugues; they also suggest that as more and more voices enter the fray, the result may not be democratic truth but a sort of malign patterning (considering social media today, we speak of the algorithm), a cat’s cradle of intersecting violences. (The intertwining of melodic lines in a fugue is, after all, superintended by the composer: The trajectories are predetermined.) Although – a few stanzas on – Browning returns to his hero Percy Bysshe Shelley and the idea of the poet as legislator, imagining “our life’s zigzags and dodges, / Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature,” he fears that “not a glimpse of the far land / Gets through our comments and glozes.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Wilde said of Browning:

The trope of the “machine” is appropriate to the Industrial Revolution and its transformation of modes of work, leisure, and self-expression; the language of “method,” to the development of scientific, and other specialized knowledges, and the aspiration of the age’s so-called sages, to an equivalent authority. That Browning’s uncertainties about language make him modern few would dispute. But for “mechanism,” we might substitute an awareness of the media-saturated, information-overloaded bodymind struggling with the impossible aspiration to understand itself, finally, through an ideally cleansed and ringing declaration of values. There is no “ultimate wisdom” in Browning’s poems, only moments of conviction alternating with ideational turbulence. We speak of the unconscious mind but these peaks and troughs of thought-feeling are cultural.

Is taking a bird’s-eye view of disputation on the ground, and seeing voices in ferment as comprising an appreciable music, to flee actualities into a myth of order? Browning’s poetry portrays and also challenges aspirations to self-sufficiency. For Erik Gray, it is actually “the disinclination to impose one’s views on others” that defines the dramatic monologues:

I see from Romantic poetry onward a new kind (different, say, to Pope’s satire) of relational, social poetics, pressured into being by changes in society. It’s about how people in new living arrangements, and exposed to intensive and discomforting information-flows, articulate their beliefs to others, and, more than that, understand themselves in terms of not only those beliefs but also styles of proclamation.

A declaration of principle can be an attempt to convince someone, or oneself; the disinclination Gray notices, of Browning’s speakers to change the minds of others, may read in terms of the poet’s own doubts concerning a public sphere where debate leads to truth. Instead of discursive citizens, we have egotistic and egoistic self-performers. “Cleon” ends with its titular speaker noticing the advent of Paul and Christ. The reader is granted an easy ironic victory over his failure to countenance what’s to come. His insistence that Christianity is a thing of meaningless scholarly disputation, even delusion:

As in Harryette Mullen’s “Elliptical,” complacencies of speech (arising from, but also producing, in a feedback loop) complacencies of thought, are acidly arraigned. Cleon feels the king’s wrong to ask after Paul, since Paul, and Jesus, are wrong; which means the “scholars” preaching Christianity are also wrong. He insists some opinions have no force within the cultural conversation (“as if his answer could impose at all!”), disavows the power of print to lend authority – “He writeth, doth he?” – and disowns citation; the idea that when a number of people contribute in a network to the construction of a discursive system, what they say matters. In other words, this isn’t only another Victorian poem about disbelief, following Higher Criticism of the Bible; exposures, through colonial exploration, trade, and news, to other religions; and troubling geological discoveries (Darwin’s theory wouldn’t be published for another five years). It’s also an allegory concerning new forms of both public and specialized knowledge-transmission, and their baffled evaluation.

What convinces me that Browning has contemporary debates around authority and opinion in mind is the parenthesis (words in brackets are always important in his poems): “as I gathered from a bystander.” It’s the practice of cherry-picking from a babble of voices: Cleon rejects citation as group-think, but also instinctively quotes the first person who agrees with him. Creaturely proximity – a renewed parochialism – is one defense against the challenges of a vastly extended social network, where one has no option but to become sensitized to more perspectives that can be feelingly and meaningfully engaged with: voices merging into a roaring wall. The ending of “Cleon” may depict the advent of Christianity, but also expresses talk’s destabilizing exponentiation under a new idea of society.

Stefanie Markovits analyzes a Victorian crisis to do with “action.” How to move from opining, to actually effecting change, for a solitary (but multifariously impacted) consciousness within an ideologically riven public – a person continuously and unbearably aware of countless events, as well as commentary on them; interpellated into rhetorics of evaluation, yet feeling all the time an uncrossable divide between talk and reality? She cites John Henry Newman on “controversy,” which, “at least in this age … is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together” – a vision of millions suddenly wrenchingly exposed to a plurality of viewpoints, and seeking stability – as well as Walter Bagehot on the “age of discussion.”Footnote ⁹⁴

I’m curious, and I think Browning is too, about selves enabled into enthusiastically opining speech – that, even when it isn’t to do with convincing people, still requires their presence. The shift from lyric to dramatic verse can be understood in terms of a change in available inspirations. Heightened utterance becomes possible only with others in some sense present: It is inescapably, unstably, relational. Mill’s description of poetry pivoting on speech “overheard” acknowledges, and seeks to repel, this state of affairs. His sealing off of poetry from eloquence projects onto poetry a new experience of simultaneous overdependence on, and ultraindependence from, others and what they believe. The editors of the Bedford Times could write in 1845 that railways, by “bringing men and places into intimate connection; and by producing perfect intercommunication, are enabling nations to understand each other, and thus eradicating prejudices which have endured for ages.”Footnote ⁹⁵ But that semi-colon is a magic-trick: Intimacy and understanding are different things. In the 19th century, people moved from talking face to face to arguing with newspaper opinions – strongly moved, impinged upon, by individuals they’d never met, and with whom conversation wasn’t possible, yet feeling, still, a need to respond. The eloquence of Browning’s speakers isn’t only remarkable for the duplicities glimpsed between the lines; there is also its sheer intersubjective vim occasioned by incomplete, yet hectic, liaisons.

Arthur Hugh Clough’s early poem “Love, Not Duty” starts by granting that “thought may well be ever ranging, / And opinion ever changing.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Clough never found an outlet for his radical politics, and his poetry gets characterized in terms of wasted potential. By the end, he turned from original composition to translating Plutarch: “It is odd how much better I like this … than I do anything which requires distinct statement of opinion or the like.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The writing of poems couldn’t be separated from pressures both internal and external (“requires”) to opine; it’s the situation Hopkins tries to localize (like a containable virus) within Browning’s oeuvre. Clough feels too porous to the views of millions; if his opinion’s one among many, it can be outshouted or ignored, but also loses from the outset any guarantee of ontological reality:

This poem’s called “In Stratis Viarum,” not “In the Streets,” because the populous city overwhelms – mannered Latin elevates the subject-matter but also holds it at bay. Biblical phrasing – “Blessed are” – is recruited subversively: To hold to one’s religion is to practice (in a happily unwilled way) a type of agnosticism. To not experience oneself as either boxed-in or belated: “things that stand before them” allows for both readings. To “piously ignore” such things seems like retreat; there’s a slight sneer to the line: Clough envies those who can silo themselves against, at once (his verse relentlessly conjoins these phenomena), both others and their own self-doubt. He verges on opining defensively, concerning such people, that what’s possible to them and not him is a bad thing. But to “have not known” is to inhabit a realm of unfallen innocence – he’s looking back longingly, on his way out of Eden. If he can’t return, Clough hopes that somehow, within a city heaving to burst, his existence can be justified by a small group of the felicitously certain, exempt from his own vacillations between conviction and despair – such as led to an unappreciated poetics of mercurial moods.

These stiff quatrains are insufficient to the energies they evince. The longing to lapse into an anxiety-ending complacency is uneasily indulged and ironized by dully regular prosody: “so let me think whate’er befall.” I’m not saying that regular metre and rhyme necessarily mirrors conventionalities of thought, but Clough was, like Hopkins and Browning, a poet who expanded his cognitive range through stylistic innovation. Influenced, perhaps, by Faust – he translated Goethe – Clough’s Dipsychus alternates a verse-dialogue between a man and the devil on his shoulder with a conversation in prose between the poet and his unimpressed uncle:

In the late 20th and 21st centuries, experimental, hybrid forms, using prose, arrive to conceptualize “public opinion.” But Clough shows this occurring as early as the 19th century, as poetry fears its kinship to the news – the dangers of doxa. The answer for Clough, as for Hopkins and Browning, lay not in depicting dialogue, as here, as if one wrote a novel or drama, but in mixing enstrangingly with metre the bounce of kinetically clamant (as well as self-thwarting) speech. Hopkins’s sprung verse wasn’t a justified system but an idiosyncratic sensibility with room for ornament, excess, spiky speech-sounds corresponding to psychosomatic volatilities; Browning’s blank verse is often pseudometrical (Wilde’s joke was that Meredith was a “prose-Browning, and so is Browning.”)Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Likewise, Clough’s ingeniously free English hexameters don’t only respond to the newly dominant status of prose fiction, but also newfangled vociferousness. (To return to Rubery’s excellent book, we’re talking here not only about times of radical change, but also, for Victorians as for us, “the public perception of living in an era of radical change.”)Footnote ¹⁰¹ Commencing to speak, we’re absorbed into opinion-culture at the very same time as we’re trying to define ourselves, through utterance, as free agents. The phrasal energies available to a voice that is existentially uncertain come to provide the most compelling inspiration (Hopkins, complaining about Browning, is clearing the space for other types of – clearly divine – inspiration, to prevent them being crowded out).

Clough’s Amours de Voyage – which Markovits relates to the problem of action – depicts and dissects such impulsions in its forms. I speak of his hexameters, but also the epistolary verse-novel, whose sections can be diffuse (unlike lyric) and informationally rather than narratively extended (like, and unlike – especially in tone – detail-saturated epics; Clough writes mock-epic). Presuming, unlike Browning’s monologues, geographical distance between the speaker/writer and their addressee (Claude’s first letter begins, “Dear Eustatio, I write that you may write me an answer, / Or at the least to put us again en rapport with each other”), the epistolary verse-novel matches the urge to opine to a vigor arising from the fear of, and also a corresponding reckless, to-hell-with-it plunge toward, disagreement.Footnote ¹⁰² In Rome under French attack, Claude cannot give a clear picture of events he feels obliged to evaluate:

It is with a restive mixture of form and freedom that Clough’s hexameter line sonically apprehends a baffled consciousness. Telling us that “debates around hexameter served to produce a powerful metrical imaginary in Victorian England,” Yopie Prins mentions “the rise of the British empire, as England was struggling to accommodate foreignness both within and beyond its national borders.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Given the current Prime Minister’s complaint about the country becoming “an island of strangers,” I would stress, were I, say, editing a new selection of Clough’s poems, the topical relevance of his writing, but the challenge inheres in our diminishing ability to feelingly perceive his fusion of contemporary speech-rhythms (which aren’t ours) with a prosody still more alien.

Since it’s a classical metre oriented to length of syllables and not accentual stress, Clough could have used hexameter in a more continuously jarring ironic way, to stress the chasm between contemporary clutter and antique gravitas. This is, after all, mock-epic, in which courage shrinks into neurosis. But I don’t think this characterization sufficient. For example, he recovers from hexameter norms, in Greek and Latin, a style of enjambment allowing, now, for counterintuitive line-endings – recreating in hybrid verse the onrushing self-consciousness of a letter whose prose is decomposing into het up speech. It is forms on forms, melting down under the pressure of utterance. “You” shouldn’t rightly take a stress, but comes on strong from rhyming harshly with “do.” Claude experiences Eustace’s inquiry about Rome as a demand he can’t meet because the complexities are beyond grasping. There is too much information to hold in the mind, let alone communicate. We don’t get to read Eustace’s letters: So his demand, producing in Claude this nervous reaction, seems exerted by no particular agent, but to arrive of an oppressively englobing atmosphere, that internalized morality which insists the world-citizen stay informed and inform others. Elsewhere, Clough asks: “O, may we for assurance’ sake, / Some arbitrary judgment take, / And wilfully pronounce it clear / For this or that ‘tis we are here?”; his Seven Sonnets record the temptation, amounting, at this time, to an inevitability, of fastening to a “self-willed arbitrary creed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ An Englishman in a foreign city under siege, Claude’s plight dramatizes that of anyone “here” – in our realm of relativism, our creedal lifeworld – pressured toward pronouncement.

Arbitrariness is all to Claude: He feels his journey a matter merely of “juxtaposition” – a concept vital to this Element, which compares unlike poems and has them talk to each other, but for him a denuded baseline. The things he’s seen, the woman he falls for, everything, expresses only where he happened to be, and when:

Claude becomes a foreign correspondent in the newspaper as well as the epistolary sense. He is where the action is, in a war zone, where “experience” as durée fractures into sensational, describable events – experiences. He’s supposed to know the facts and have the right opinions. But this isn’t possible. So it’s with a desperate sensitivity that he describes what it is to be carried through a city in a crowd, losing the sense of what’s occurring and even who one is; registering viscerally what it’s like to move with and against the tide of public opinion. Beats of smugness, gestures of helpless enmeshment: Claude’s smarm splinters, he loses confidence partway through (and regains it, and loses it again). The scandal of repetition is activated: Clough’s hexameters can be as iterative as Homer’s. The oral poet’s weighty formulae swap out for the becrazed superfluities of the observer reduced to an impotent onlooker.

“A man was killed, I am told, in a place where I saw / Something; a man was killed, I am told, and I saw something.” As if Claude really were in that “court of justice,” and required to testify; being told, not only that a man was killed (failing to grasp this himself), but also that he “saw something.” While Claude was there at the scene, this feeling of distance from the main concern, as well as a destabilizing proximity, matches with those turning the pages of The Times with a mixture of empowerment (a gain in knowledge and, with it, supposedly, control) and subjection. Politics has rejected Claude, but he pretends it’s the other way around:

Claude repeats himself because he is obsessed with his impotence, but also because of the rearrival, in his flooded mind, of a recognition impossible either to avoid or to lastingly live with. He hits on the issue of his (and our) time: Reading the news, he is assailed by events he feels strongly about, and situations he wishes to change, but which vastly exceed his actual zone of “control.” Prevented from action, he would discharge his emotions in speech, writing, leading to action, yet cannot reconcile himself to a version of today’s Twitter pseudopolitics: “What is the good of that? Will swearing, I wonder, mend matters? / Cursing and scolding repel the assailants?” This perception doesn’t, however, allow for an exit from evaluation: Claude does swear, curse, scold – becoming (prefiguring E. M. Forster, but also D. H. Lawrence, reacting against this mode) the opinionating English traveler abroad. A man repelling otherness – the sensorial onslaught of Rome – through a performance of disdain; whose overwrought takes make him feel only briefly safe and in charge, no longer messily involved but as aloof as a spectator of paintings in a gallery or artefacts in a museum.

Claude’s love-affair fails partly through his snobbery toward Lucy Trevellyn’s family, and in this Clough touches on seismic shifts in the English class-system, as newly moneyed industrialists begin to infringe upon their Oxbridge-educated social superiors. Rhetorics of discrimination self-sow, with accusation pinging every which way:

Poetry and class come together. To quote the wrong poet exposes one’s origins; the middle-class like to know of books, but don’t want to be “bookish” (lazy, unambitious, with no work-ethic). To opine about poetry is to be perversely inspired, like a poet themselves on their “loftiest flights,” allowing one’s utterances to be scanned, as a poem is scanned for its prosody, for any hint of the wrong “accent” (in not the prosodic but dialectal sense). It is, as in Browning, and what Hopkins said of him, the fear of enthusiasms becoming domineering; of intimacies squashed, not furthered, by cultures of opinion that provide the only vocabularies with which feeling-states are verbalized and status proclaims itself.

Claude cannot articulate his feelings about Lucy to her, Eustace, or to himself:

The historical evolution of poetry out of song and toward speech is reiterated, and related to opinion. We have, again – remembering Keats, Solmaz Sharif, and Rosmarie Waldrop – the sexist idea that a woman, like a poem, isn’t meant to say things, but to be an aesthetic phenomenon – to sing (“no, though she talk, it is music”). Yet also the counter-idea, essential to post-Romantic poetry, that poems do have a truth-value since “melodious meaning” is not an oxymoron; and that this kind of meaning has a way of getting around opinion by keeping ideas in psychophysiological process, like Lucy who never, “however you tempt her, consents to / Step from ideas and fancies and loving sensations to those vain / Conscious understandings that vex the minds of mankind’. Claude’s pseudopraise of women as creatures of feeling liberated from cerebration also theorizes an incorrect kind of “understanding” – equivalent to misunderstanding. A line-break has us wonder for a moment, as to what exactly Claude would “tempt” Lucy to consent. His real preoccupation, however, is with modes and means of resistance to opinion-culture.

W. B. Yeats also praises patronizingly – in his poem “On Woman” – she who, unlike a man, won’t quarrel “with a thought” simply “because it is not her own.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ But he oftener projects onto women his worries about opinion, seeing them as especially susceptible. Writing in the 20th century, and to distinguish his aspirations to Irish Home Rule from fanaticism, he claims women are cursed:

Yeats designates the violent nationalism of Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz a sort of biological error. The “stone doll” is both a fetish and a baby that appears to have died in childbirth, but which its mother cannot emotionally disclaim. Fidelity to a political cause he redefines as frigidity: Men are – supposedly – as “easily false” to opinions as to lovers, which Yeats finds healthy (rather than a weakness of conviction, or fear of intimacy). His opining about opining inverts his true relation to Gonne: Really, he, infatuated, worshipped her as a statue. Envious of her cause – which she loves more than him – he denigrates it as a search for identity; Gonne, for her part, commented that his poems of unreciprocated love provided the same for him.

Shifting to Yeats’s verse: Both “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” and “A Prayer for my Daughter” gender opinion intensely. David Dwan links these poems to “highly politicized representations of women within the literature of counter-revolution,” and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford notes that “the shrill-voiced woman was associated in popular culture with suffrage agitation, and Markievicz was a suffragist.”Footnote ¹¹² But if we can hold in abeyance our own opinions about the opinions these poems contain, what else might we find? In other words: What does (the) poetry (of Yeats) make perceivable, that we can’t dismiss, one-up, in our own virtualizations of political work?

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,” said Yeats, “but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry”; yet “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” is a poetic dialogue containing a quarrel.Footnote ¹¹⁴ “I have principles to prove me right,” He avers; and She – ending the poem, and perhaps the conversation – “They say such different things at school.” The poem begins with an opinion about opinion before hastening to redeem that infinite regress. “A rush” is a blade of grass, but Yeats did contend that “Nobody running at full speed has either a head or a heart” – as if a denatured consciousness could (seeking sanctuary in a manor house, and watching swans?) escape 20th-century opinion-culture.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Robartes reduces, crabbily (“it’s plain”) the altar-piece to evidence for his theory: His interpretation is both ingenious and reductive. In response, the woman skewers his blather: “You mean they argued.” The speed and violence of the poem’s jostling utterances feed off each other, as within the public sphere.

In “A Prayer for my Daughter,” Yeats tries to outwit his own combativeness. His mind’s dried up because the world has turned against the minds, “the sort of beauty,” he approves; he doesn’t, however, wish to react with anger, since “to be choked with hate” makes one vulnerable. The tone is self-persuading; it is dramatic speech excruciatingly aware – though it makes the venture anyway – of how (poetic) language lends to creaturely reactions only a specious dignity. Concocting, out of the pieces of credence that are metrical feet and rhymes, the notion that his “mind / … knows” what’s best, Yeats positions that “mind” as but one, restricted, frailly persuadable, aspect of who he, or anyone, is. He prays his daughter will “think that opinions are accursed,” because she, like, others, appears immune to rational persuasion in this, or perhaps any case; a point of exhaustion is reached, resembling Clough’s plea: “so let me think whate’er befall.” Yeats can’t control what others think, or what he thinks; convictions materialize of no specific origin and post-hoc fabulation is rife, politicizing vehemences of temperament.

On June 20, 1941, Robert Frost read “The Lesson for Today” at a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa event. A mock-sermon, its title is self-deprecating about, but also enables, his propensity to opine in verse: The occasion of the poem’s creation is included within it. It’s tricky because Frost also wants to criticize others for opining – those, for instance,

“The time is out of joint,” said Hamlet: For Frost, the activist poet is a pretender (wishing to be like Hamlet, or his creator), an excuser of their own creative incompetence (the bad truth of the world becomes their justification for writing poorly). Neither received poetic language, nor “too much social fact” (too much for poetry, or too much for anyone to bear?) is politically capable. As John Forbes had it in “Toposthesia,” we discuss culture from inside it, but for Frost this becomes a rejection of any sort of progressivism. This is also the poem which ends, “I would have written of me on my stone, / I had a lover’s quarrel with the world” – a line really inscribed on his headstone just over twenty years later.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Frost is, then, as interested in quarrels as Yeats, and like Yeats, wishes to turn actual heated conversation into something else. Yeats quarrels with himself to create poetry: Frost quarrels with the world, but it is “a lover’s quarrel,” succeeded by reunion (and then further quarrelling): part of an emotional rhythm bespeaking not diremption but mutual commitment. When lovers quarrel, the opinions they express are flotsam crashed about on big affective tides – what seems the substance of the matter may be nothing but a grabbed-at occasion. Returning Frost’s epitaph to the end of his verse-sermon, we may understand better a poet whose poems argufy, are motivated by grievances (“When they want to know about inspiration, I tell them it’s mostly animus,”) but who, through poetic form, also seeks to transcend that situation.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Juxtaposing Frost with Yeats, I wish to consider – reapproaching the 20th-century canon – how a post-Romantic poetics of speech interacts with two issues. First, there is what Yeats is getting at (like Christopher Bollas, in my first section): the appropriation of politics to personal drives. (The irony is that Yeats’s generalizations about women belong to the opinion-culture they excoriate. To take a personal experience of fragility, and theorize from it tendentiously, is – has been, countlessly – a means of coping, or failing to, with anxieties around knowledge within an expanded public.) My second concern is with how poems of formally honed, but speech-lively, phrasing extend a wisdom-tradition that, prominent in the Renaissance, was transformed within educational practice in the 18th and 19th centuries. William St. Clair:

Following my readings of William Blake and Anthony Vahni Capildeo, I wish to consider the consequences in the 20th century of a post-Romantic perspective that values poetry as a vehicle for original thought, but still yearns toward collective wisdom. John Guillory, for example, sees Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” as, from this vantage, a patchwork of commonplaces not in the old sense activated within Sean Bonney’s dreamed commons, but the new, pejorative sense. To a Romantic and post-Romantic reader who has got beyond “the peculiar force of banalities expressed in a specific linguistic form” – for whom sententiae have transformed into clichés – Gray’s poem no longer “seems to be uttered by the Zeitgeist, as though it were the consummate expression of a social consensus … The tradition of Romantic criticism has been suspicious enough of commonplaces to wonder at the source of their power, and even to trouble itself about the value of a truth which anyone might possess.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Retrieving in the 20th century and in the United States a poetics of the proverb from Longfellow (who provided the title of his debut, A Boy’s Will), Frost commits – “In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, ‘Oh yes I know what you mean’” – to an irretrievably self-conscious enterprise.Footnote ¹²⁰ As Richard Poirier puts it: “metrically and by other formal devices, he insists on our acknowledging in each and every poem, however slight, that poetry is a ‘made’ thing. So, too, is truth.”Footnote ¹²¹ Although he reactivates the idea of a shareable wisdom housed in isolable phrases, Frost’s also interested in (as he wrote to Louis Untermeyer; the emphasis is mine) “saying things that won’t formulate – that almost but don’t quite formulate.”Footnote ¹²² What happens to proverbs in poems once the unified community presupposed by a wisdom-tradition ceases to exist? Frost sometimes sponsors, sometimes criticizes, a parochialism that connects with the borders of the nation-state and the supposedly self-authoring individual the attractions of a boundaried language.

John Kerrigan and Marina Favila analyze one of his most famous poems, “Mending Wall,” in which

“He likes having thought of it” is readable in terms of remembering or creation. Since Frost believes poetry is “never to tell” the audience “something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying … something they recognize,” the point about “hearsay misvalued as originality” is worth repeating, for at this subtlest of moments he acknowledges the subsiding of proverbs into opinions under a post-Romantic conception of knowledge. It isn’t only that the neighbor is submissive to “his father’s saying”; he has internalized it to the point of confusing a verbal formula with his own original “thought.” Wondering where our thoughts come from means, for Frost, wondering where our sentences come from, and – despite the individualism which led him to reject Roosevelt’s New Deal – this troubles the idea of a boundaried, self-authored person. As Margery Sabin observes, what Frost says about sentences and their sounds is often misread, to postulate “first, a kind of coherence of personality; second, a sense of personality made coherent in relation to an event. But Frost’s point about the dramatic vitality of sentences promises neither of these things.”Footnote ¹²⁴ If, as Steven Gould Axelrod notices, “at times, Frost attributed to himself a kind of up-from-the-bootstraps economic autonomy that he did not actually possess,” this makes the persona both confirmed and disconfirmed by his poems an avatar of contradictions within the politics and the literature of the United States.Footnote ¹²⁵

One way to approach Frost’s fictionalizing and formalizing is in terms of the prioritizing of homespun idioms. The rough-and-ready-seeming, but actually calculated, charm of Frost’s poetic diction, passing into his readings and lectures, brings to mind his country’s politicians. David Evans remarks astutely of the poet’s disagreements with Roosevelt, that “ironically, the two men may have had more in common than Frost was willing to recognize … both were masterful public performers, so adept at manipulating folksy tones as to seem almost the voice of America speaking to itself.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Some approaches to the literature of the United States obscure such resemblances. Endorsing, for example, Whitman’s willingness to contradict himself, what do we make of politicians whose followers aren’t dissuaded by lies, because the overwriting of reality with what one feels avidly to be the case is precisely the source of their identification with them? Fascinated by styles of opining in the United States, and a division between urban and rural sensibilities which, like its politicians, he uses to position himself, Frost writes poems with peculiarly declaiming and disclaiming arcs, showing how one can mistake for an impossible self-agency (disguise, as a heroic independence) what is really sheer cussedness. It isn’t possible to say whether the poems finally endorse or ironize this move: They do affirm its paramountcy.

In other words, that which Yeats usually projected outside of himself and sought to repudiate, Frost enters into and ventriloquizes:

For Evans, “it is less accurate” to describe Frost’s “thought as unreconstructably conservative than as fundamentally skeptical, and the ideological movements of the 1930s, combined with the triumph of a professional optimist such as Roosevelt, called forth all his intellectual and political skepticism”; Jay Parini remarks of another poem that “in a lovely twist, the skeptic is even skeptical of science.”Footnote ¹²⁸ But skepticism has different flavors, ranging from Nietzschean savvy (“Etherealizing”: “A theory if you hold it hard enough / And long enough gets rated as a creed”) to hawkish paranoia.Footnote ¹²⁹ Take the supposed freethinker who considers it their American right to bellow to others about the moon-landing being faked, or about 9/11 being an inside job. (Switching to Ireland and Yeats, we might also consider, before taking Gonne’s side – and literary criticism can be as crude as this – that she was as passionate an anti-Semite as she was an Irish nationalist.) Frost’s poems aren’t really about the truth of ecological or nuclear catastrophe or stellar redshift. They arrive of a cultural situation where “some say” this and “some say” that; where “the saying is never done,” as Frost puts it in “The Vindictives,” and the intricacies of science (and politics, economics, and more) elude most of us.Footnote ¹³⁰ To be born within the amniotic sac and never escape it suggests the “skeptic” can’t see clearly. Yet Frost believes in such borders; his individualism, applied also to the self-determining nation-state, considers them necessary – so “Skeptic” is also a defense of the self’s defenses, of the fictionalizing, confabulating imagination. Science isn’t only reduced to belief in ways recognizable from popular discourse, including conspiracism; the word “fact” is also assimilated by an idiom of opinionation that takes assertion for reality. “As a matter of fact there are times when I …” Stubbornness becomes a self-cure and a protestation of autonomy.

For Frost, poetry is where you can exaggerate and others can’t object: “people hold you. You say something sad and something cynical, and they forget to allow for the extravagance of poetry – that you’re not saying that all the time. That’s not a doctrine you’re preaching.”Footnote ¹³¹ Yeats’s spiritualism allowed him a space of assertion similarly invulnerable to fact-checking: “Because there is safety in derision / I talked about an apparition, / I took no trouble to convince, / Or seem plausible to a man of sense.”Footnote ¹³² The post-Romantic definition of poetry as functioning in the world but also specially exempt from its demands maps onto the longing of the individual within a mass public for a space of private, undegraded reflection, as a recourse against the claims of others and their own internalization of suprapersonal discourses. But in “Fire and Ice” hold does a lot of work, as the poem appears to argue a relational self, that, because it can’t transcend rhythms of agreement and disagreement, tries to reconstrue its convictions as choices: “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.” The rhymes and other sound-effects – how, importantly, the o in “hold” carries over, is transformed into, “know” – reveal caprice, an involuntary porousness to other perspectives, restyling itself as a voluntary entertaining of differing ideas: “I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.” It is a poem about endings that finds through rhyme a sufficing ending, while also drawing our attention to the process and the experience of saying, that comes of the crossing of a threshold of, if not knowledge, then accumulated conviction. It is possible to see the voice, the person, in this poem as a needle on a meter ticking without volition from one value to another.

In “Remorse for Intemperate Speech,” written in 1931, Yeats does recognize that he’s projecting onto others that which he would, but finally cannot, disclaim in himself:

The inability to “rule” one’s fanatic heart echoes the movement for Home Rule that foundered in civil war – Irish history has imprisoned Yeats in polemical moods and modes. “Nothing said or done can reach,” alter, the feeling-states he has carried from his “mother’s womb”: Yeats himself becomes the stone doll of opinion locked into a fixed rage. “Nothing said or done” includes the things he furiously says and tries to do; is an idiom of opinionation evoking “intemperate speech”; the phrase also (in a poem where every word has been carefully weighed as, in confab, isn’t the case) alerts us to the distance between saying and doing. As one who, as Seamus Heaney puts it, “bore the implications of his romanticism into action: he propagandized, speechified, fund-raised, administered and politicked in the world of telegrams and anger” – Yeats knew that opinions are not identical with policies.Footnote ¹³⁴

Irish politics seemed to have, at the start of the 20th century, become opining divorced from action; the events of 1916 and after were still understood in terms of how they were clashingly interpreted. For Yeats, whenever one tries to speak or write, it’s hard to come out with anything but opinions –

“All empty souls tend to extreme opinion,” writes Yeats in Estrangement; Leonard Strong quotes him as saying that “culture does not consist in acquiring opinions, but in getting rid of them.”Footnote ¹³⁵ This isn’t simple snobbery, for he is talking about his own situation; reconceptualizing opinion as an encumbrance, a temptation, the shape which, in crises, language tends irresistibly (because simplifyingly) to take; recognizing that one of the roles of opinion-culture is to aerosolize crisis until it becomes a ubiquitously possible escape from one’s ambivalences and uncertainties. This is partly about money – “bad times are good times for papers,” writes Keith Williams, when “conformists and reformists both” wish “to see their respective opinions confirmed in print” – but it goes beyond this, concerning the citizen-as-creature and energies aroused, inflamed, flattered, furthered, and recirculated within affective networks.Footnote ¹³⁶ As Wordsworth remarks of life in France during the Revolution:

Controversy – at the risk of repeating myself – takes on a “life” of its own. Selected feeling-states – indignation, for instance – become predominant across the political spectrum; anger provides an unlikely refuge, since when angry, it feels like we know for sure who we are (and who others are). As such, approaching poetry in terms of a vacillation between politics and retreat doesn’t work, since it depends on a binary division, separating the real from the unreal, which any serious discussion of literature must controvert, but which is also untrue to events that are, by opinion-culture, irresistibly virtualized. Yeats’s vision of Ireland in “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” is broadly applicable: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare; / More substance in our enmities / Than in our love.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Friends with Yeats, Frost shared with him – “William Butler Yeats says that all our words, phrases and idioms to be effective must be in the manner of everyday speech” – both a spoken poetics and the habit of speaking incitingly about poetry. When Cleanth Brooks observes to him that “Yeats said that he started a poem with a little tune in his head,” Frost hastens to clarify that this isn’t about shifting lyric back toward song: “Yeats said a good many things, and I’ve talked with him about that. He said that nothing he hated more than having his poems set to music.”Footnote ¹³⁹ It turns out that what Yeats says in public isn’t the same as what he says privately; that poetry itself is a form of saying or talking – for Frost, “the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.” He says this a lot; invited to opine about poetry, he keeps coming back to this idea – and he acknowledges this:

Frost doesn’t just say what he thinks, but acknowledges that which it is sometimes, frequently, irresistibly, his inclination to say. Symbols meant something else to Yeats. But he too scales up the creative imagination in a microcosmic-macrocosmic way, linking life and literature. Or, politics and phrasemaking, as both poets play “against preestablished accent … the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation” (Frost), framing the voice of “an active man speaking” (Yeats) – which, thereby, remains above the fray while still influencing it.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Both seek an impossible equilibrium, to do with putting one’s two cents in and not feeling immediately, even preemptively, contravened by amassing others. When Yeats speaks of “certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions,” I think of Frost insisting that “the abstract vitality of our speech” preexists persons and shapes what they say: It’s as if both poets practiced affect theory avant la lettre.Footnote ¹⁴² Our thought-feelings don’t derive from supernatural sources, but may – both perceive this, try to theorize it, including, in their poems – originate outside us in the movements of culture.

Yeats and Frost write verse-dialogues – they were dramatists too – where voices clash; their apparently monovocal lyrics also express a reactive poetics. (I don’t mean reactionary, though this word can be applied to both.) I borrow my term from W. H. Auden and his Partisan Review essay styled as a court-transcript, “The Public v. the late Mr. William Butler Yeats.” Published in 1939, it responds to the insistence under war conditions that a poet evince, as the “prosecutor” puts it, “a working knowledge of and sympathetic attitude towards the most progressive thought of his time.” (If it’s easy to laugh at this, as at terminally online disputes today, we should as literary scholars recognize that our own methods, perspectives, approaches aren’t always so different.) The Defence argues back:

A poetics of reaction arises as, assailed by a thousand contrary claims, the post-Romantic poet – following industrialization, urbanization, mass print, news, the telegraph and radio, and eventually the television and internet, and the rise of media politics – reconstrues cultural reflexes (the speed, for instance, with which one takes offence, applies what is said to oneself, hurriedly responds) as the intensest, perhaps the only accessible, form of inspiration.

In this context, poetry is heightened patterned speech tied to an overstimulating, event-laden sensorium, in relation to which, ever since technology conjured it, new modes of interaction and withdrawal have developed desperately. Auden also noticed that Yeats had reinvigorated occasional verse; Frost, as we’ve seen, described his inspiration as “mostly animus” – their poems have, often, the feel of strong interpersonal reactions. Their poetics of speech is kinetically social, which means that even when they strike stances of renunciation, it comes across as another move in the debate. We see this when they’re asked for war-poems: Yeats, by Edith Wharton, during the First World War, and Frost by Louis Untermeyer, who worked for the Office of War Information during the Second:

Frost’s poem wasn’t published. It is an astonishing exercise in extended doggerel that, reducing the political to the personal (Untermeyer’s friendship matters more to Frost than the war) becomes sensationally, self-consciously, inadequate (“I know what’s wrong … ”) as a geopolitical review. What is exposed is an irrepressible contextuality that can reshape or deform any utterance, and is relevant to better-known – I want to just say, better – poems. Notably “The Gift Outright,” which, read at Kennedy’s inauguration, uses “gift” still more nebulously than Yeats does, and is a public declaration of manifest destiny that momentarily, in what is suggested is a necessarily trivializing way, acknowledges in parenthesis and with a pun not only battles with the British but also Native and Black genocide, and more: “(The deed of gift was many deeds of war).”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Yeats’s “A Reason for Keeping Silent” was published in Wharton’s Book of the Homeless. Later he altered its phrasing to “I think it better that in times like these / A poet keep his mouth shut,” republishing it as “On Being Asked for a War Poem.” It is in both forms a defiantly occasional work, whose moment of encounter and reaction is inexpungible from its patterned speech. On the one hand, the poem is a marmoreal reminder of that indispensable distance from agitprop which agonized Yeats – “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” – but it also characterizes itself as the utterance of a moment.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Embracing the excusable defensive vitality of a rejoinder, it resembles a dramatic monologue whose meaning is inextricably contextual. We can track in it the changing contours of a social voice. The first line’s regular beat suggests an effortful regathering of traditional resources, an inherited hauteur, toward liberation from the claims of others. After the line-ending, the clause continues but the metre is overrun by demotic speech: Poets should “keep our mouths shut.” Then this voice, that has lost its composure, stabilizes again toward gravitas – “for in truth” combines the tone of judicious argument with the setting up, quite clearly, of a rhyme. The point seems to be that the poet doesn’t know war as well as the statesman; or, that he has “no gift,” no means of, or route toward, persuading such a person; or – moving toward Auden’s idea, in his elegy for Yeats, that “poetry makes nothing happen,” yet remains a counterforce – that the power of verse inheres not in discursive “truth” but lyric indirection.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

That a poet might suffice themselves with, merely, the power to “please” those entering on life or about to leave it invokes a universality (love, death) trumping history. Yeats revisits the idea in “Politics,” written on the eve of the Second World War (and his own death), and again a rejoinder, this time to the statement by Thomas Mann – “In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms” – appearing as its epigraph. The poem frames itself as a clash of opinions:

Trying for a precarious honesty, Yeats grants he is swayed by the opinions of others, but also notices that his “attention” – unfixable, wavering, shunted about by teeming events, and takes on them, within the attention economy – becomes locked, in defense, to personal concerns. It is the unchosen technological expansion of one’s consciousness to encompass multitudes, which stimulates the counterreaction of a rediscovered parochialism, shrinking the zone of one’s interest down, even, to the dimensions of one’s own body. This is a poem about such siloed talk (echo-chambers, filter-bubbles, and the rest of it) as we struggle with today. If it is, for Yeats, about resisting the pressure to become a spokesperson, it’s also about the narrowing, in times of crisis, of modes of response. As Auden puts it, in one of his 1940 “Shorts”:

It is possible to, without equating wartime and peacetime, imagine an extreme amplification in exceptional circumstances, of tendencies ever-present within the postindustrial public sphere – and its participants already, prior to social media, and in Jaron Lanier’s parlance, “Twitter-poisoned”: antagonized, chafing, umbrageous.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Ezra Pound would be one example well known to Yeats, Auden, and Frost; one way of reading Auden’s great elegy for Yeats (written a year earlier, in 1939), and the iambic tetrameter with which it resonantly and styptically concludes, is in terms of the dead poet’s liberation not only from a world at war, but from a more generalized zone of “intellectual disgrace”: “let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry.” For Auden, “the living nations wait, / Each sequestered in its hate,” but prior to this formalization of affect in terms of warring nation-states, there hovers a transnational horror that cannot be identified with one ideology but emerges of technologized discourse itself.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The transformation of actual, stained, worldly speech, into something, in post-Romantic poetry, that is also speech, but stands in a different relation to worldliness – “gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech / Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease,” in Yeats’s phrasing – is taken up by him and Frost as the most personal and unachievable of aspirations.Footnote ¹⁵² It leads them to postulate safe spaces where conversation fizzes but without injurious consequence. Accordingly, Yeats wishes to trade, in 1916’s “The People,” the “daily spite of this unmannerly town,” for the court-culture of 16th-century Italy where “the duchess and her people talked / The stately midnight through until they stood / In their great window looking at the dawn”; Frost writes in “The Star-Splitter” of an amateur astronomer who, having “mingled reckless talk / Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,” defends his hobby by saying “there isn’t anything / More blameless in the sense of being less / A weapon in our human fight,” and enters into inspired conversation with the poem’s speaker: “Bradford and I had out the telescope, / … And standing at our leisure till the day broke, / Said some of the best things we ever said.”Footnote ¹⁵³ But what are these people talking about, exactly? A type of speech-intensity remains essential, but is curiously fenced-off.

The velocities of Yeats’s “fanatic heart” relate to Irish politics but also a broader, maybe global, situation, given the intense reactiveness, the diffused constant irritability, afflicting any information-bombarded consciousness seeking and finding only the flimsiest of sanctuaries. “When I come home,” he writes,

This experience can be historicized. It is post-Romantic and post industrial. Keats felt similarly closer to the start of opinion-culture. Oppressed by others to the point of his own identity seeming to vanish, or utter itself in spasms – “Why did I laugh tonight?” begins a sonnet of social cringe – he redefines this phenomenon as negative capability in a letter frustrated by Charles Wentworth Dilke’s addiction to opining. Frost, or one of the speakers in “Build Soil – A Political Pastoral,” feels “imposed on, silenced and discouraged” by the incarnation of the state in a “more economical producer” whose “speech and thinking is so much my better”; the answer is to “unostentatiously move off / Far enough for my thought-flow to resume.” This image reappears in his lecture “On Taking Poetry”: “I hear a talk like this from somebody else, see, and I may not be able to hold my own with it – not then. I think to myself that when this is over … my own stream-of-consciousness will get going again. I’ll be all right.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Withdrawal is one option; it prevents the opposite – the urge Yeats suffers, to assert one’s visibility, hearability, through overstatement, manifesting, returning to Hopkins on Browning, the bread-and-cheese voice arriving of a culturally unavoidable, an all-pervasive choler. Yeats’s poems consider often the protection of one’s otherwise uncontainable bodymind: “Hands, do what you’re bid: / Bring the balloon of the mind / That bellies and drags in the wind / Into its narrow shed.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Turning to Frost, we might consider the sanctuary provided by his Derry farm from 1900 to 1906 – where he didn’t read the news and isolated himself wholly from other “minds” – leading to his first book and providing him with an abiding metaphor for poetic creation: a retreat from overinvolvement into a less relational space. Sometimes his poetry seems a type of purely self-enclosed, nonrelational, play with syllables and feet – the knowingness of the diction becomes so ludic as to resemble Yeats less than Dr. Seuss. Movements toward knowledge are validated in terms of how partial, provisional, playful they are. By indulging the urge to opine, to elucidate, Frost engages the reader; refusing to exalt that desire into wholesale theorizing, he grants them a little space, while also making sense of the world as, for him, a poem had to:

Herein lies the resistance of verse to its transformation into ideology. But there remains the question of where the “impulse” originates. Furthermore, the idea of the poem as a living thing potentially out of the author’s control further challenges that fixed solid self seeking to confirm itself through acts of utterance charting a path into the public world.

It isn’t only in the work of Western, canonical poets that there arises a post-industrial, post-Romantic preoccupation with opinion. Eunice de Souza was born in 1940 in Pune, to Goan Catholics. She specializes in the advice-poem: works whose speaker, as in Frost, would summon a proverbial wisdom, but in which we become aware that she’s also trying to persuade, besides her listener, herself. De Souza’s one of many Indian poets who, writing in English, don’t consider it, at least always and perpetually, an imposed language to be used only in a subversive or counterappropriative way. But she knows she is writing in one of the colonies where what was understood as the canon was constructed as a means of Anglicizing the locals. One way she sifts these matters, in advice-poems where the question of authority, and its power either to suppress or liberate, is uppermost, is by putting allusions to Western classics in the place occupied, in Frost, by the proverbial.

Consider her references to Shakespeare in her final collection, Learn from the Almond Leaf, and its poetry of climate crisis:

De Souza spent four decades teaching in Mumbai, a city described as “grappling with air pollution, erratic monsoons, worsening floods and landslides, and increasingly extreme heat”; in 2024, temperatures across India reaching as high as 51 degrees Celsius killed over 100 people.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Yet the lyric’s emphases waver. “Flamboyance / is all” ghosts two Shakespearean proverbs: “readiness is all” from Hamlet, and “ripeness is all” from King Lear – putting, as in Frost’s “Mending Wall,” a spin on an existing phrase, or phrases. (The leaves also recall his “Nothing Gold Can Stay”: “Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour.”)Footnote ¹⁶⁰ De Souza, querying the best stance toward received wisdom, puts canonical literature in that position – writing poetry about a planetary crisis especially ruinous of the Global South. But the “flames” are not only those of overheated India, but of gorgeous, fallen leaves – of Heraclitean transience: Within this poem a climate activist speaks out, but also a stoical woman aware her own death approaches; who has moments of wishing (us) to “learn” from nature, not how to heal the damage done, but how to acquiesce to the eventual destruction of all things.

Rephrasing Shakespeare – sampling his authority, in a culture where speakers of several languages often drop into English, proverbial or slangy, when wishing to convince – de Souza recognizes that action and inaction have roles to play. Or: It is the rhythm we noticed in both Yeats and Frost, of a move toward and then away from the public world. De Souza pleads, or prays – appealing either to “somebody up there,” or politicians and polluters “down” on the ground – switching between postures of engagement recommended by opinion-culture:

Wordsworth wrote that “one impulse from a vernal wood” could teach us “more of moral evil and of good” than books.Footnote ¹⁶² “Close on the Heels” insists we “learn,” finally, about our ruination of flora and fauna and its consequences; but the poem is, like Frost’s “Fire and Ice,” skeptical of the assumption that opining about crises will really reverse them. A matter-of-fact urgency recognizes its limits and posits a different, more indirect type of learning from circumstances, which also resembles the indirection with which post-Romantic verse interacts with politics. Given the self-consciousness of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, as to the fragility of convictions degrading into opinions, de Souza’s advice-poems may sound sure – resembling that no-nonsense, bread-and-cheese voice critiqued by Hopkins – but, as in a dramatic monologue, doubts are discoverable between the lines.

De Souza’s feminist poetry takes the gendering of opinion in a different direction. Women in Dutch Painting, published in 1988, includes several poems that either give advice or resist advice-givers: “Advice to Women,” “From You I Have Understood,” “Songs of Survival” and “Songs of Innocence,” “Transcend Self, You Say.” (“At Veena’s Wedding” was written earlier and left unpublished: “There are no happy rebels, you said. / Settle down. Don’t cut your nose / to spite your face.”)Footnote ¹⁶³ De Souza is working with the idea of a woman as someone who can be persuaded, who is demonized for being, potentially, too persuadable (unfaithful); she slams Indian matriarchs who would dominate the next generation with edicts. Her fascination with alternatives to strict authority is shaped by the political turbulence of 20th-century India; her precarious status as an Anglophone poet in the Global South; and also (the word “learn” recurs) her profession as a teacher at St Xavier’s College – a legend to her students, whose accounts of her charisma belie her poems torn by doubt.

There is no contradiction, should we understand the citizen inside opinion-culture as oscillating wildly between conviction and uncertainty; as, indeed, gaining the power to convince others through a sublimation of their own insecurities:

The expected idiom would be, “practice what I preach,” but with a play on words, “Otherness/Wise” brings in de Souza’s vocation – connecting her advice-style to a lived experience of pedagogy. She also wrote (besides fiction) a column for the Mumbai Mirror: A journalist as well as a teacher, she designs poems around moments where fact and opinion intermix. The teacher becomes the inverse of the duplicitous politician, doing good not harm by inventing and transmitting to her students forms of strength unavailable to the woman herself; the journalist speaks truth to power, according to the 19th-century model with which this Element began. But within de Souza’s poems, conviction and doubt can live together, neither cancelling the other out; moments of declaration interlard a relational process susceptible to misgivings.

Yeats and Frost require psychological and physical sanctuaries, retreats, from public strife: de Souza’s “Invitation” postulates a location where the power-dynamics of opinion, which Waldrop, Clough, and Yeats understand, in their different ways, in terms of male–female relations, can be revised into feminist solidarity:

Introducing a new edition of de Souza’s poems, I quoted this poem and was tempted to cite Lauren Berlant:

The Indian poet-critic Arvind Krishna Mehrotra – who knew de Souza – advised me not to do this. US-dominated academia readily applies the concepts of US scholars to literatures from around the world (Berlant was clear in her focus on her own country.) Our professionalized opinion-culture keeps generating, for “politics” – that essential abstraction, without which literary analysis would appear gauche – prefixes like “juxta” and “infra” which beg the question. We want our words (about words) to reach, grasp, understand, and change, that “world” the women in de Souza’s poem withdraw from before, like Yeats and Frost, being drawn back into the fray. But if the initial retreat is nothing as simple as escapism, might their return to the front also be read in different ways, in terms of, for example, the attractions of a soap opera? Controversy, de Souza suggests, is inevitable – “the world’s / not getting on” – and, when it takes on a life of its own, can stop you living yours. When the “village,” local and global, argues over matters of moment, it is also an outlet for relational impulses. With a slightly shifted phrase, as in “Otherness/Wise,” a surprise to the eye and to the ear that may catch us out, the joke-ending of “Invitation” points to the blending in public discourse of the real and the unreal. A better word would be virtual, the concept I hope to flesh out in this Element’s last section.

The Virtual: Wright, Kleinzahler, Limón, MacNeice, Byron

Robert Frost also liked to compare poetry with sports: “when I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics … I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing … You must have form – performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form.” A sports-star has stretches of good and bad form; poems have forms; the connection with masculine physicality is a stretch, and there’s also a queasily sexual tinge to “score”:

This zone of “performance and prowess,” where success can’t be denied, reverses the subjective murk of book-culture and seeks to replenish poetry’s dwindling cultural capital. The fantasized creative “feat” becomes empirically, verifiably, triumphant, resembling sports and also economic-scientific, quantifiable, productivities achieved through capitalist competition. Frost would purge opinion from literary evaluation (no more reviews, just a final “score”), but it turns out this isn’t so easy (“why don’t critics talk about those things?”), since even sports “feats” do not occur in a void, but are predicated on conventions. Consider his own famous refusal of free verse, as playing tennis with no net; or the footballer doing with her feet what is disallowed to her hands, and what her opponent tries also to prevent – discovering, thereby, a pressurized expressiveness that requires our understanding of the game’s rules to be appreciated.

Frost is describing sports, and poetry, as games, and, as Bernard Suits puts it, “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This game features no opponent except critics and other writers; or does the reader occupy this role, meeting one’s efforts or resisting them with their contrary and conflicting opinions? If, writes C. Thi Nguyen, games “can offer us a clarifying balm against the vast, complicated, ever-shifting social world of pluralistic values,” one reason is that “in a good game, our opponent’s attempts to harm us may, in the right circumstances, actually be channeled so as to create experiences we value.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Frost characterizes poetry in terms of a possible triumph that others must validate, but which, also, they’re powerless to prevent – it is solitaire, or the athlete focusing on beating their own record. We approach – I wish, in this section, gradually to move beyond sport – the idea of post-Romantic poetry as a mode of self-consciously virtual endeavor which can thereby disclaim fettering responsibilities while still speaking of and to the world. For the moment, I’ll examine three modern poems about sports, opining about sports, and the sublimation therein of energies crossing multiple domains.

From Homer and Pindar onward, writing about sports has been encomiastic, and a place to test the relation between words and action through the author’s own “feats” of mimetic evocation. Somatic deferrals are of sports-writing’s essence, and become its subject: Homer’s warriors sprint or race in chariots as an alternative to fighting – rebuilding intracommunity bonds in wartime. Jahan Ramazani sees poetry in terms of its “others,” and sports fit the bill as a realm of redirected and virtualized energies.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ What happens to and within the “forms” of post-Romantic verse, then, as poetry, like sports, activates feeling-states linking otherwise atomized persons, in a culture of otherwise – it would seem – self-stoking dissensus?

Frost is thinking, as often, about the classics, like Homer and Pindar, but also about US campuses and his country’s enormous financial as well as affective investments into sports, turning it into a nationwide passion surrogate and a generator of political idioms. Here are James Wright, August Kleinzahler, and Ada Limón on the same subject:

Wright’s poem is about sports; Kleinzahler and Limón’s, about opinions about sports – all three depict social frustrations seeking symbolic resolution, extrapolating from “hard cases” a theory of culture.

Opinion enters Wright’s poem in the pseudologic of the verse itself. The syntax blurs the matter: Is he in the stadium, thinking (instead of watching the game), or outside, imagining other, blue-collar, spectators? It’s a poem about anecdote wishing to be data, and how interpretation may arise of specifics not as their cognitive consummation but as a bulwark against their sensorial flood. The shift from “I think” to “therefore” seeks to “improve,” returning to Samuel Johnson’s phrase, “opinion into knowledge,” but are we (meant to be) convinced? “Dreaming of heroes,” “dying for love”: These summaries share an alliterative and intonational contour. Conviction builds toward the conclusion that working-class frustrations are projected onto the field. The movement is analytic, but the drive to rise above the situation through analysis of it – to protect oneself – remains within the ambit of opinion-culture.

Wright’s concern is the powerless: Kleinzahler contrasts, sectioning his poem, “those who truly matter, assembling that day’s world, disassembling it” in urban centers, with “sad, old bachelors, chewing the cud.” Sociologists following up, today, on Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, stress not one but “multiple publics” and examine changes – I return to Evan Stewart and Douglas Hartmann – “in the way society adjudicates who attains “elite” status and what constitutes reliable public knowledge and information.”Footnote ¹⁷² What groups do share is the habit, returning to Kleinzahler, of “commenting at length.” Swapping out the expected phrase “chewing the fat” for “chewing the cud,” Kleinzahler, writing his “Summer Journal,” may be thinking of Keats’s “Four seasons fill the measure of the year … ” with its image of the soul’s “summer, when luxuriously / He chews the honied cud of fair spring thoughts”; also of Chaucer’s conceit from The Canterbury Tales, where pilgrims are mischievously compared to animals in heat in Spring: “(So priketh hem nature in hir corages): / Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Well before Freud, poetry’s language of thought-feeling – its interweaving of mental modes – touched on affective structures that housed and transformed troublesome impulses. Indeed this is one of the functions of poetry itself.

“Chewing the cud”: the creatureliness of utterance doesn’t invalidate it, but we might reconsider opinion’s sociological function and the flow of “combativeness” between realms. (Wright’s gridiron footballers “gallop” like horses but also resemble those cattle raised for slaughter to which Sean Bonney compares British citizens.) As conduits of feeling thrombose under myriad pressures, what was a release becomes a prison: energies stagnate, or, while riskily contained, augment exponentially before launching out. (I think of “Gamergate”: the far-right radicalization of frustrated young men that began with a tantrum over video games before transcending that subculture.) Considering sport and its opinion-cultures, it’s possible to see the resistance to its politicization – outrage, for example, at on-field protests against racism – in terms of the preservation of a protected zone in which to indulge one’s assertiveness. When opining about politics becomes risky, there’s the weekend game to argue over instead. Within this masculinized space, Limón’s father and stepfather can interact: “just when / I thought I couldn’t watch the pause / lengthen between them, they’d talk about / the playoffs or the finals or whatever … / and sometimes they’d even shrug or make / a motion that felt like two people who weren’t / opposites after all.” The mimetic line-break on “pause” contrasts with, following it and as tension is released, run-on lines emulous of freed talk. For the moment, both men are on the same team, moving in unison.

It is the search, again, for a safe space of virtualized animus – in which, as Yeats puts it in “Prayer for my Daughter,” to “quarrel” but “in merriment.” Sports and sport-culture, poetry as well as literary culture, can provide. In these zones, one gets het-up but – apparently – without lasting consequences, just as the sensory-seeking play of lion cubs (or human children) expresses, realigns, impulses belonging to the hunt. But play-fighting can turn into the real thing. People have been killed over sports, and Yeats worries in “Man and the Echo” that his poetry has caused great harm:

The violent nationalism espoused by his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan – starring Maud Gonne and voicing those convictions which, elsewhere, he disparaged in her – is compared with, probably, Yeats’s tempestuous affair with Margot Collins. One person’s writing arouses many to insurrection. But Yeats also uses the word play to refer to private, self-sufficing creativity. He writes to Augusta Gregory, in “To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing”: “turn away / And like a laughing string / Whereon mad fingers play / Amid a place of stone, / Be secret and exult.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ So he’s not only talking in “Man and the Echo” about a play, but exploring the relation between free creative play – seen as a defiantly private act – and real-world pain. We might consider, today and in the UK and the United States, politicians racing to accuse their opponents of discourse actualizable as violence – words, that is, moving beyond the performative pugnacity normalized in stump speeches and online. Here, as in the situation that concerns Yeats, stylized performances of conviction lead to violence, and words like “performative” are stretched to bursting in both scholarly and popular discourse.

By virtual I relate the literary to the extraliterary, in terms of an overlap between mutually defining domains relevant to multiple areas of postindustrial society. Although the term is value-neutral, its most obvious, and most disturbing, application is to those whose prejudices erase the facts; the entrepreneur of their own opinions, mistaking for interventions the reproduction of stale controversies. In this light, here’s a poem, “Budgie,” by Louis MacNeice that, published in 1963, seems eerily to predict Twitter:

Tom Walker situates this poem within its moment of possible “nuclear apocalypse” – it “subjects Yeats’s concept of tragic joy and the attitude to history on which it rests” to the feeling of “imminent catastrophe.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ MacNeice’s profound and enduring engagement with Yeats is tied to Irish, and Anglo-Irish politics, but poems by both can illuminate many events, including the crisis of internetified opinion in the 21st century.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, explains its branding: “we came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Which returns us to the creatureliness of utterance, here explicitly acknowledged, but soon dropped from Twitter’s marketing. Exaggerating its alignment with grassroots activism, the platform soon declared itself the very incarnation of Habermas’s public sphere, announcing on its front page: “It’s what’s happening” and “See what’s happening in the world.” By a sleight of hand, a cascade of information and disinformation, of commentary on events, not events themselves, was evoked as the sine qua non. We all entered the Matrix. Now that Elon Musk has taken over and rebranded Twitter as X, it has become more acceptable to criticize it, but even these screeds – the chattering classes are addicted, they don’t want to let go – fail to reckon with the larger problem of algorithmically envenomed online discourse, and the consequences of the wholesale mergence of journalistic and literary cultures with social media ecologies.

What happens politically when we state our opinion? Usually, very little (though the essence of opining is to pretend otherwise); but personally? We publish a little picture of ourselves for public consumption, as a way of designating one’s location on the political map and of feeling solid ground beneath our feet. Mixing “attitudinizing,” as MacNeice has it, with platitudinizing, we convert impotence to (self-)importance; here is the connection, for him, with that aesthetics of self-expression which Romantic poets embodied in birdsong. MacNeice travesties Coleridge’s conception of imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am,” to show how brutalized that Romantic vision of the self has become.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ “The mirror jerks in the weightless cage”: The blue bird resembling Twitter’s logo is a narcissist and solipsist. To reiterate: such self-siloing, as a coping mechanism following one’s technological sensitization to an amorphously expanded, sensational public sphere, preexisted the modern definition of social network. That which MacNeice, who worked for the BBC, connects to mid 20th-century radio and television broadcasting, goes back to, in Deidre Lynch’s words, “the commercialized climate of manufactured and manipulable passions that was the late eighteenth-century culture of sensibility.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Multiple generations have shared the bird’s experience of isolation through, paradoxically, overconnection; events beyond the cage aren’t ignored so much as dematerialized by states of inattention enforced by data-overload. We use technology to occlude the larger views that technology might generate: The bird is isolated, or isolates itself, within an artificially maintained bubble of self-importance. But it would otherwise be crushed.

Resembling the lyric poet (given the pun on “I am” and “iamb”), the bird’s also an actor, a performer-voyeur – relating to others only in a mutual “peep”-show – a (to quote the ludicrous Nathan Barley from Charlie Brooker’s equally prophetic satire) “self-facilitating media node.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ “Let me attitudinize, / Let me attitudinize, let me attitudinize”: It’s a shit-stirrer and shitposter whose opinions are there to be exclaimed at. “For all the world is a stage is a cage / A hermitage a fashion show a crèche an auditorium / Or possibly a space ship.” We move from Renaissance self-fashioning to the hubris of SpaceX, through overlapping travesties of the public sphere, as a zone of play and play-acting, a jail-cell, a means of both isolating oneself from, and exposing oneself to, others; a performance-space in which earnestness turns performative, where the latest fashions in terms of both clothes, and opinions to wear on one’s sleeve, are a must; where one is infantilized by a culture-industry designed both to monetize and nullify one’s impulses within the equivalent of a “creche.” The final line-break on “television” doesn’t only suggest that our entertainment-technologies can become forms of surveillance – it also isolates on the next line the word “actor,” degrading the idea of action, of the citizen as a political agent, into vain (in both senses) pretense.

What is poetry’s role? Peter McDonald argues of MacNeice’s book on Yeats, “begun in July of 1939 in the British museum, where readers were ‘searched for I.R.A. bombs when we entered the gate’, and completed in America with Europe at war,” that it allowed him to measure “his own inability fully to transcend the pressure of events” against “the elder poet’s ability to absorb external conflict.”Footnote ¹⁸² In it, MacNeice states, “it is my own opinion, though it was not Yeats’s, that the normal poet includes the journalist – but he must not be subservient to him”: His BBC work is clearly relevant to “Budgie.”Footnote ¹⁸³ He writes as – to quote another of his poems – one “inured to surprise”; meaning both global catastrophes, and unending commercial stimuli; a nonstop flood of events and pseudoevents, causing real and false urgencies to collide unremittingly through a spongiose consciousness:

MacNeice’s Autumn Journal aspires to an unflinching honesty – “I was writing it from August 1938 until the New Year and have not altered any passages relating to public events in the light of what happened after the time of writing.” But virtuality comes into the mix as he spots himself, writing, saying things he doesn’t mean. He is, like us, a “creature of over-statements,” regarding a world uncapturable by such utterances as we emit in cycles of “hatred” and “escape.” His rhymes give a perceivable shape to otherwise unglimpsable arcs of affect. A forest of feeling-states gives way to a shriveled repertory: a cleaving to the immediately and facilely expressible traps us in a factitious “song” of indignation, hauteur, and dismissiveness, repeating ad nauseam and providing moods on tap.

MacNeice’s mode of self-suspicious sprezzatura, where rhymes cognize what feels a pre-existing and inevitable clamancy, was pioneered by Byron in the 19th century. Coming of his feeling, as he puts it in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, that “opinion” had become “an omnipotence, – whose veil / Mantles the earth with darkness, until right and wrong are accidents,” it results in the explosively efflorescing self-consciousness of Don Juan’s ottava rima:

Playing with the idea of legal opinion, Byron compares the jokey, improvisational flow of his poem to a text of great moment – Edward Coke’s commentary on Littleton which provided the basis of common law. It resembles a moment in Sean Bonney’s Letters from the Firmament where the passing of the Ku Klux Klan Act, never named or explicitly discussed, is swiftly noted: “9^th March 1871. A difference of opinion.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Byron and Bonney stress the thin line separating “opinion” in its colloquial sense from declarations of power neither inherently progressive nor regressive. Coke is still cited today, including, in debates around Roe v. Wade; the Act passed by Ulysses S. Grant, giving the President the right to suspend habeas corpus, was designed to suppress racial violence in the South, but its provisions codified down the years into statutes have been countlessly used and abused.

What is, then, for Byron, a ludic dalliance with colliding views, has something in common with legal process. Poetry and power aren’t, it seems, worlds apart; law formalizes what was once creaturely – personal, subjective – opinion. For Jerome McGann – writing of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers – Byron’s poetry “exposes the lack of a cultural consensus,” though I hesitate at his applauding Byron for uniquely doing so in this period, and for calling the verse clearly “communicative.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ “If a writer should be quite consistent, / How could he possibly show things existent?”: Byron’s is a virtual poetics, concerned with the postindustrial secularization of the invisible and the inexpressible; his rhyme-led digressions convert into a sparkling game the steering of opinion down “canals of contradiction” dismissible as “fiction,” but “which may be render’d also true” by urgencies aroused and exploited, not suppressed, by circumambient excitements.

Although Byron admired Pope’s classicism, his own satire does not, cannot, perceive beneath glittering surfaces any core values immune to attrition. His one-upping is perennially susceptible to refutation, including, by his own compulsion to object, which in the absence of anyone else speaking, self-targets. Refusing to declare himself the author of Don Juan, Byron wrote, “everybody may form their own opinion”; the poem itself is spectacularly alive to, takes its self-cancelling energy from, its awareness that very few knowledge-claims are genuinely cognizant – in the cultural moment commencing in his century, and lasting to this day – of the now technologically tangible existence of the “millions” who, if we’re correct, “must be wrong.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ This is what turns assertiveness virtual: when utterances jostle within a field whose limits fluctuate and are ceaselessly redefined. As Byron wrote to John Murray, opining about opinion in its collective and public sense:

With not one but two self-citations – the letter to Hobhouse, and the phrase from his own “Stanzas,” “love brooks not a degraded throne!” – Byron seeks and as usual achieves his characteristically paradoxical posture of aristocratic republicanism. He transcends the “canting” millions, refusing to become such a monarch of sensibility, as would, leading public opinion, become dependent on it.

“Whene’er I have expressed / Opinions two … / Perhaps I have a third too in a nook.” We may think of Groucho Marx, announcing his principles but with the caveat that if we don’t like them, he has others. Or, sticking with poetry – “If people contradict themselves, can I / Help contradicting them, and every body, / Even my veracious self?” – of Walt Whitman thirty years later and in the United States, absorbing dissenting multitudes into his persona with a colloquial blitheness that, as I’ve suggested, suffuses US politics too. Ever since M. H. Abrams’s characterization of Byron’s “ironic counter-voice” distinguishing him from other Romantics, his style has been read as a “subversion of all received ideologies” (Charles LaChance), a “debunking process” through rhyme (Philip Hobsbaum) – as deconstructive, if not destructive, and radical for that reason.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ I prefer the relational perspective expressed by Jim Cocola, who suggests the “vitriol was perhaps fueled as much by contrarianism as by radicalism.” This links Byron’s poetic sensibility to “the spirit of contradiction” which was for William Hazlitt the spirit of the age: “the great source of dogmatism and pertinacity of opinion.”Footnote ¹⁹¹

Hazlitt describes a contrariety shared by writers and politicians of different stripes. “I was born for opposition,” writes Byron; and Hazlitt remarks of William Cobbett:

I don’t, then, see Byron’s ottava rima as annihilative, but in terms of endemic postures of reaction and counterreaction that his rhyme makes tinglingly apprehensible, if not comprehensible: energy-currents that his verse rides, and always with a curious tension restyling itself as ideational gusto, since he is appropriating a form from Italian narrative poetry into English, where rhymes are fewer and to write ottava rima is to engage in, to apply Frost, athletic “feats” of word-linkage – sometimes, perverse feats. Reversing Pope on mimesis and allowing form to generate content, Byron reveals that our utterances don’t just shape themselves to existing assumptions, but may even be generated by controversies that speak, in a travesty of Romantic inspiration, through us. Although he may get a laugh by counterposing what seems clearly real and what is undeniably fictive, Don Juan more often understands these categories as indistinct, given irresistibly virtualizing tendencies within the public sphere.

Prior to Yeats’s transformation of ottava rima into a form of symbolic action that he hoped could transcend opinion, Byron embraces it as quite the opposite.Footnote ¹⁹³ Catherine Addison helps us understand how a narrative form becomes, in Byron’s hands, an opinion-form of energetic commentary and metacommentary, observing that “a couplet in the ottava context encourages a complete utterance that is briefer than what went before and hence more pithy and proverbial.” Because this couplet “is likely to remain focused on the same topic as the sestet because of the paragraphing or batching effect,” Byron’s often step back from their subject, cantankerously evaluating what’s going on.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Writing his Letter to Lord Byron in 1936 – finding ottava rima tricky and using rhyme royal instead – Auden opines in couplets about the tendency of “the average poet” to opine in verse: “His sense of other people’s very hazy, / His moral judgements are too often crazy, / A slick and easy generalization / Appeals too well to his imagination.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Poets use rhyme to reinforce their arbitrary judgments. This is a Byronic idea, but Don Juan goes further, using rhyme to represent, to make available to analysis, a commentary-culture preexisting individual willfulness. We have in Byron’s ottava rima, which, unlike rhyme royal, doesn’t drowsily normalize successive couplets, but keeps the sense of a uniquely analytic eruption at each stanza’s end, an acknowledgment, arising of the form itself, of a worldly pressure to comment, evaluate, opine. We get a glimpse of the poet enmeshed in world events and at one and the same time trying both to understand them better and to rise above them, through a feat of analysis:

These lines mock mainstream Romanticism’s nature-worship. But Byron also wrote in that mode, also felt those things. The couplet’s ingenious synthetic rhyme brings together my two concepts – the creaturely and the virtual. We may think of Kleinzahler’s radio callers “chewing the cud.” People are social animals, and if the development of the public sphere caused from the start a problem to do with separating information from disinformation, fact from opinion, this also expresses the dilemma of the citizen-as-creature thereby interpellated – whose opinions, that would be reasoned, remain emotive cries. Cultural reflexes, which “the most part learn / To plague themselves withal, they know not why.” Byron seems to wreck what Coleridge and Wordsworth considered “philosophy” by collapsing it into the fevers of “puberty.” It’s a funny joke – as in Forbes, interpretation as punch-line, a feat of timing in the comedic as well as the prosodic sense. Yet is the poem’s voice in control, or carried to its conclusion (“I can’t help thinking”) by preexistent forces? The habits of intellection denoted by the rhyme-words “discern” and “learn,” and also “think,” are neither reinforced nor straightforwardly exploded; the experience of reading Don Juan is of coming to feel that any language of ideas must remain affective in inevitably underexplored ways. It isn’t just the Lake poets who operate in a virtual space – it’s everyone.

Theorizing virtuality, I am thinking of deepfakes and fake news; of astroturfing, disinformation, and disinhibition. But also of the rhetorical crescendo, foregrounding politics, expected of a book like this one as it ends – the pressure to mention the word “politics” at important moments throughout our work, rather as Frost would diverge from but return to that iambic beat guaranteeing the value of his enterprise. Literature and commentary around it (including our scholarship) could be accused of turning what is sociologically momentous into a virtualized form of political work, where victory or defeat is finally inconsequential. My conference paper, my peer-reviewed article, probably won’t change the world; we may come to see it as unethical, appropriative, to assume, to make a career out of pretending, that this is the case; were we to enact our politics more actively, fearlessly, elsewhere in our lives, it could free us to write about books in a less stymied and programmatic way.

Trying to turn poetry into active, direct, clearly empowering or harmful speech – into, even, revolutionary action – we make a mistake. Disclaiming the virtuality of literature, we lose sight of poetry’s revelatory proximity to the virtual in its extraliterary manifestations – political “theater”; convictions that, disguising reaction-formations as reasoning, spread virally; affects morphing dangerously between discursive precincts; the rhetoric-value of all representations, including performances of sincerity and appeals to apparently pure fact, within a hyperbolic and hypertrophic mediasphere (legacy, and social) that doesn’t just report, but creates the news. As recent events have made painfully clear, literature has no monopoly on the virtual. To read a poem is – among other things – to be temporarily freed to consider why we believe the things we do, and to be reminded that we are creatures of thought-feeling for whom, as for Hazlitt, “ideas, from their sinewy texture, have been … in the nature of realities.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷