Abstract: Calls to decolonize the Victorian canon have contributed to increased critical interest in Indian poet Toru Dutt. Our current scholarly approaches have proffered nuanced evaluations of the relationship between colony and metropole in Dutt’s English-language poetry. But admirable efforts to center Dutt’s voice in scholarly readings of her work have deprioritized close reading of the English texts with which Dutt was in conversation. The effect of this approach has been to obscure the complexity of Dutt’s poetic engagement with her English referents. This essay offers a Miltonic reading of Dutt’s most anthologized poem, “Our Casuarina Tree,” to show how attending to Paradise Lost as closely as Dutt did makes available new readings of her work. While a conventional interpretation of “Our Casuarina Tree” posits the poem as a meditation on the poet’s fraught dual identity, I read the poem’s deployment of Miltonic form, imagery, and thematics as a reflection on feminine labor and the work of the woman poet. Training a close eye on Milton’s epic, I argue, helps us more fully credit Dutt’s own poetic labor. Ultimately, I suggest that decolonizing our analytic frames requires enabling colonial poetry itself to direct our readerly attention.
Abstract: This essay examines the role of women in Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kin g, focusing especially on the significance of towers within the poem. I argue that Tennyson rereads these structures’ usual coding as glorified medieval backdrops as sites of confinement, which thus prompt rebellion. The towers reflect societal pressures on women and embody their individual struggles against the patriarchal ideals iconized by Camelot. The women of the Idylls , such as Enid, Elaine, and Isolt, critique the chivalric codes by reinterpreting and resisting their prescribed roles, activity that plays out through their interactions with the poems’ complex spaces. Through their experiences, the poem places a gendered individualism against the monolithic cultural narratives of heroism. This essay argues that the enclosed spaces of the towers foster a rich inner life for the women, allowing them to undermine Camelot’s stability through nuanced, but profound, acts of defiance.
Abstract: The elegy and the amatory sequence, although we study them as different genres with distinctive histories, are often intertwined. The first two parts of this essay juxtapose poems by three Victorian poets that are at once love poems and elegies: Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1850), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The House of Life” (1870, 1881), and Christina Rossetti’s two sequences “Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets” and “Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets” (both 1881). Caught between lyric and narrative, between the stasis of love or grief and willed movement along a difficult narrative trajectory, each poet seeks ways to make the isolating intensities of feeling less so: through the impersonality of form or personification, through larger timescapes with cultural as well as personal resonance. The concluding section focuses on temptations to silence confronted in their lyric sequences by all three poets. Finding “no language but a cry,” each is tempted not to write at all. And yet, they do, mourning a loss that threatens to become the loss of poetry—a fatal alienation from language epitomized in a wordless cry with its own history in English poetry and song. They write at once toward and against their own deaths.
Abstract: Harold Bloom argues that the study of poetry uncovers “the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.” I explore how Emily Brontë’s voice anticipates that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Brontë, with her Romantic commitment to the “God within my breast,” and Hopkins, with his theological commitment to using his art as a tool to realize Christ’s presence, might not appear to have much to say to each other; however, one poet’s writing helps to further our understanding of the other’s. Two terms that have come to be associated with Hopkins, instress and inscape , assist in making sense of Brontë’s response to her world. Both poets come together in the fullness of their yearning to find an answering voice in the world and the pain when that answering voice proves so capricious.
This article makes the case that Victorian poetry has something distinctive to offer, in this moment of neoliberal individualism, to the project of building collectives. We might at first assume that the novel form more readily affords an engagement with social worlds, focused as it is on the interaction of characters with each other and with socioeconomic conditions. But this essay reads the collective "we" speaker of Victorian poetry as an effective form for bringing people together. It considers Ebenezer Elliott's "Caged Rats" (1831), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children" (1843), Rudyard Kipling's disturbing "Recessional" (1897), and William Morris's "March of the Workers" (1885) as different models for speaking together in groups.
Metadiscourse about literary criticism often presupposes a distinction between academia's inside, where we find authorized experts, and its outside, where we find "amateurs" and "the public." Think, for example, of the commonplace that publishers want academic books with "crossover appeal," that is, the potential to attract the interest and dollars of a mythical lay reader. Such notions and terms, however, obscure the material conditions of intellectual production and consumption today: how adjunctification, the cratering of the tenure-track job market, underfunding, and attacks on education have fostered what I call "manufactured amateurism" within colleges and universities while driving PhDs into contingent and so-called alt-ac positions, as well as other industries entirely. From my vantage as a university press editor and independent scholar, I argue that there are divisions to be drawn not between inside and outside but, rather, between disparate professional roles, labor conditions, markets for scholarly writing, and access to resources. Redressing the striking absence of publishers from discussions of the state and fate of literary studies, I argue, moreover, that university presses have long occupied a constitutive outside, mediating among far-flung communities and collaborating with scholars to sustain fields such as Victorian studies-and journals such as Victorian Poetry-amid and despite widespread institutional disinvestment. Including publishers in these discussions-both engaging us as fellow knowledge workers and critically reflecting on the role of university presses-helps bring into relief the collectivism at the heart of scholarly work and create the solidarity we desperately need if we want to strengthen and build our shared institutions anew.
This essay draws connections between what might seem like two very different bodies of writing: Chartist poetry and modern academic scholarship produced by those who lack support or incentives for research, especially non-tenure-track faculty. In many respects, it is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but it illuminates questions about the relationship between pedagogical work, political work, and creative work that reverberate through higher education today. I start by observing that the unremunerated and extracurricular writing characteristic of Chartist poetry is increasingly the norm for academic scholarship as well. I then turn to the life and writings of Ernest Jones (1819-69), a major Chartist political leader and poet and a complex figure with unique affordances for imagining solidarity today. After meditating on how Jones's declining class status parallels the recent trajectory of faculty work, I argue that Jones usefully models a way to find the self in the collective and to combine activism with creative expression. In the final sections, I return to a reflection on connections between the material circumstances under which knowledge of Chartism is produced and the Chartist poetic and political project. Considering the parlous state of higher education today, I emphasize the political impotence of scholarly writing and the necessity of collective action.
In 2024, I saw the ongoing crises facing higher education in the United States reach a new inflection point, both for my own career and for the broader professions of academic work. In this essay, I draw from my experience at St. Norbert College-a small, Catholic, liberal arts college in Wisconsin-and from work in Black studies and critical university studies, in order to offer an analysis of what forces humanities workers in particular will confront, as well as some ideas about what steps they can take. Ultimately, I suggest that our sites of academic labor will have to be disciplines in the sense that Mariame Kaba says hope is a discipline: spaces where we do the daily work of making what students and scholars will need in humanity's future, not just what we think will save our own positions in the world as it's arranged now.
This essay presents an intertextual reading of Tennyson’s imperial Defence of Lucknow (1879) in English and Chauhan’s anticolonial Rani of Jhansi (1923) in Hindi. Both are balladic celebrations of the 1857 Uprising in India, a major landmark in the Indian subcontinent’s history of colonization that is dominantly represented as a “sepoy mutiny” in British historiography and re-cognized by Indian historians as the “First War of Independence.” A postcolonial reading disrupts Defence ’s imperial-masculine underpinning of nationhood, which is mediated by the material context of its moment of production. But the same deconstructive process also leads to a defamiliarization of the Indian ballad’s negotiations of national identity. The play of counter-ballads based on counter-memory exposes the fault lines of nation formation and precipitates a critical understanding of nationalism itself. The ballad form, particularly the strategic ways in which its recalling of the past represents a nation to itself, offers a seductive ideological field for interrogating the relations between history, cultural nationalisms, and memory.
The close friendship between Robert Bridges and Gerard Manley Hopkins has long prompted the study of the many ways in which each poet influenced and supported the other, including their shared prosodic theories. However, little is known of Oxford publisher Henry Daniel, and even less is known about the publication The Garland of Rachel (1881), a collection of poems written by celebrated Victorians to commemorate the first birthday of Daniel’s daughter Rachel. Bridges and Lewis Carroll were among the contributors, but Hopkins was not. Only thirty-six copies of the Garland were printed, and the poems (except for the Carroll doggerel and its replacement) were never republished, making them and the volume in which they appeared relatively unknown to scholars of the Victorian period. This essay explores the history around and the nature of The Garland of Rachel , along with Robert Bridges’ contribution to it, “Press thy hands and crow,” a poem that appears to draw richly from Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” but without acknowledgment or concealment. Nowhere in his correspondence, including his letters to Hopkins, does Bridges hint at his contribution. The essay reads the Hopkins and Bridges poems in the context of the volume’s endeavor to memorialize early childhood.
The question of what poetry should be used for was rife throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. This essay examines one poet’s response to what poetry is and why it should matter: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne is a particularly interesting case study because of the excessive and immoderate reactions his work provoked in his admirers and his critics alike, and because his poetry is often thematically, stylistically, and formally concerned with waste, a word often applied as the antithesis of “useful.” Memorably, his contemporaries responded to his early poetry by describing him “tuning his lyre in a stye” and deeming him “rose graftings set in dung.” I argue that, for Swinburne, waste functions in his poems as both a mode of relation and a theory of poetics, and the two dovetail in my reading of “The Triumph of Time” and “Anactoria.” What is at stake for Swinburne in his investigation is poetry’s capacity for creating and evolving alternate forms of intimacy. I end by speculating about how his poetry encourages us to rethink or challenge an investment in voice originating in a human speaker.
Though Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” depicts isolation, it actively engages with the historical discourses of the Victorian era. I view Arnold’s poem as rejecting two competing historiographical narratives. The dominant Victorian conception of history, popularized by writers such as Thomas Macaulay and Charles Lyell, viewed history as constant, linear improvement: Insight and prosperity gradually replace the superstitions and squalor of the past. The other narrative, supported by thinkers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, conveys the opposite, that the commercialist and utilitarian present degraded the sincerity and intimate sense of community that defined the medieval past. Arnold’s speaker in “Grande Chartreuse,” melancholy at the anxious modern world, feels the temptation to believe in these narratives, but Arnold emphasizes the need to reject this temptation. I argue that viewing “Grande Chartreuse” in the context of Victorian historical debates reveals it to be more than a personal lament. Arnold views these historical narratives as too absolutist. Rejecting them means rejecting the dream of absolute clarity, but for Arnold such a choice is not innately tragic. “Grande Chartreuse,” I demonstrate, asserts the value of contemplative distance, of finding serenity by examining both narratives without dogmatically committing to either.
In this essay I argue that engaging seriously with failure- as an essential structural feature that the image-text relationship is constructed around and must navigate-enables a form of viewing-reading that is more theoretically sophisticated and attuned to the sensitivities of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's idiosyncratic double work of art form. Specifically, I propose that Rossetti's Lady Lilith (1866-68) double work-a composite of one of his most famous paintings and most anthologized poems-is predicated on failure and that the constant recurrence of failure in the visual-verbal work facilitates an exploration of image-text reciprocity, equivalency, or commensurability. By making the failure of reciprocity so central to the viewing-reading experience of Lilith, Rossetti models a way of responding to the unbridgeable formal division that sits at the heart of the two arts, painting and poetry, that he worked in.
This article investigates the wealth of geological detail across Mathilde Blind's poetry, especially The Ascent of Man (1889). Considering the influences of, among others, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin on Blind's political and poetic thinking, the article argues that she contrasts the cyclical nature of geological time with human time, which has the potential to be linear and ascendant. For Blind, intervention in the geological scheme is the cosmic destiny and responsibility of humankind. Her focus on images and themes of shaping, molding, and forming, dynamically associating tectonic action and human labor with a metaphor for evolution as a process of erosion or honing, links her scientific interests to her political consciousness. The article suggests that Blind's pinnacle of human ethical achievement correlates with that of Marx and Engels on the Communist ending of history, while also discussing how Blind's political consciousness diverges from the Marxist. For Blind, this focus on hierarchy and the responsibility of humanity for the world betrays an anthropocentrism that is strikingly Victorian. However, the poem's socialist and feminist argument culminates in an ethical recalibration of the human-world relationship.
