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3 - Experimental form in Victorian poetry
- Edited by Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 26 October 2000, pp 46-66
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Summary
In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wanted to write “a poem of a new class,” one that included “[c]onversations & events” and “philosophical dreaming & digression.” She also wanted to purify George Gordon Byron's sexually contentious poetry, to write “a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity.” But this moral aim, while acknowledging her wish to elude the precedents created by Byron, was less important than her larger formal purpose. This desire to compose a new poetic form, one that would adapt established styles to contemporary needs, and particularly one that would combine narrative and speculative commentary with the requirements of aesthetic unity, typifies many Victorian poets. It led to widespread poetic play that transgressed boundaries between the three classical genres identified by the Greeks - epic (or narrative), drama, and lyric. And in the twentieth century it led in turn to standard critical discussions of Victorian experiments with form.
Established accounts of experimentation tend to work within a critical legacy that associates experimental writing with internal features of structure and style. More recent critical practice, however, directs our attention to broader cultural contexts and particularly to the potential for cultural critique. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, for instance, distinguish two types of critique: institutional critique, which aims to expose the conditions and principles which govern existing institutions and cultural practices, and transformative critique, which aims not only to question the conditions which sustain existing institutions but to change cultural practice.
BROWNING’S BISHOP CONCEIVES A TOMB: CULTURAL ORDERING AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE
- E. Warwick Slinn
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- Journal:
- Victorian Literature and Culture / Volume 27 / Issue 1 / March 1999
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 March 1999, pp. 251-267
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ON FEBRUARY 18, 1845, Robert Browning sent a poem entitled “The Tomb at Saint Praxed’s” to the acting editor of Hood’s Magazine. He writes: “I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments” (DeVane and Knickerbocker 35–36). Because of this letter, the immediate historical context for the poem has commonly been taken as the Oxford (Tractarian) movement and Newman’s retraction in 1843. The Cambridge Camden Society (not the London antiquarian society of the same name, which is sometimes thought to be Browning’s reference) was also associated with Romanism, being accused of popery in 1844 and subsequently dissolved by the Cambridge authorities in February 1845, the same month Browning submitted his poem. (It continued as the Ecclesiological Society.) Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist (1841–), the Cambridge Camden Society aimed to study ecclesiastical architecture, following Pugin’s Contrasts (2nd edition, 1841) in complaining about the moral corruption of church architecture and promoting an ethical-spiritual basis for reform.1 Journal items focussed on a range of issues from the symbolic function of church layout to the details of epitaphs and tombs, generally mixing visual values with ecclesiology. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (139–44) and John Morley in Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (52–62) detail these issues. Browning’s “other embroilments” may well refer therefore to the growing controversy in the 1840s about sepulture and sepulchral style, about the appropriateness or otherwise of ornate tombs and canopies. Hence this poem about a deathbed scene and a Bishop’s tomb may be clearly located within the broadly enveloping mid- Victorian network of cultural practices related to death: distinctively encoded rituals of mourning, debate about gravestones and epitaphs, depictions of deathbed scenes (in painting as well as literature), and widespread discussion of what came to be known as the four last things — death, judgement, heaven, and hell.