Victorian Poetry

Victorian Poetry 42.1 (2004) 81-109

Whether "Victorian" Poetry:
A Genre and Its Period

Joseph Bristow

1

Whither Victorian poetry? Linda K. Hughes's shrewdly phrased question could not be timelier, since the academic field in question is one which has undergone so much change of late that it is highly appropriate to look closely at the various intellectual directions that research is currently taking. The diversifying contents of the last ten volumes of Victorian Poetry make it plain to see that there have been startling transformations in the academic study of English poetic works produced in the United Kingdom between the 1830s and the fin de siècle. More than anything else, the sheer breadth of a newly expanded canon means that a writer such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning occupies a position of poetic authority that previous generations of literary critics seldom granted her. And given that researchers are now paying renewed attention to women's, working-class, regional, and political poetry of this era, it almost goes without saying that our understanding of a miscellaneous range of poetic forms adapted and revised throughout the mid and late nineteenth century can only continue to gain in strength. Little wonder, then, that most of the emergent scholars whose fresh investigations are helping to redefine the contents, not to say the theoretical contours, of seventy years of English literary history have by and large fixed their attention on the future of an area of academic inquiry that remains in a state of energetic reconstruction.

In many respects, these thoughtful discussions about the prospects for the study of Victorian poetry relate to present preoccupations, ones that would seem to announce our own modern, if not—by predictable extension—postmodern, predicament. Thus, in her valuable contribution to this forum Ana Vadillo comments on the ways in which the knowledge-producing potential of electronic databases and hypertexts may well—to coin a verb—be re-phenomenalizing the Victorian poem as "a semantic, graphic, and aural document."¹ Similarly, for Andrew M. Stauffer, the growing number of digitalized sources promises to provide such a handsome supply of citations that Victorian poetry will at last be able to reveal its place within a virtual environment of untold academic richness—one in [End Page 81] which poems can commingle not only with other printed media but also such imposing entities as the holographic Crystal Palace.² These initiatives would seem to spur Helen Groth's and Ivan Kreilkamp's shared fascination with Victorian poets' immersion in a culture whose chronology coincided with hugely influential advances in technology, such as the calotype and the photograph. Such developments, together with the late-century emergence of the phonograph, film, and the typewriter, have absorbed the attention of far-reaching studies by Jonathan Crary and Friedrich A. Kittler, to name but two.³

In light of these critics' insights, the cyberspatial canon of Victorian poetry would seem to be on the verge of greater expectations than were ever before conceivable. Not only do we have the information systems at our disposal that enlarge our understanding of how poems from the 1830s to the 1890s participated in a society that proved altogether more modern than literary history has traditionally been willing to recognize. We have also gravitated to a position where we can comprehend how the future of Victorian poetry turns out to be embedded in an early twenty-first-century techno-culture that may at last pay respect to the fact. In other words, if the poetic genres produced in the period known as "Victorian" have a future, then their future resides in a present moment that is increasingly motivated by the belief that the forecast for this area of study remains exceptionally promising because the field itself belonged to a technological age whose fascination with material progress nonetheless anticipated our own interest in virtual technologies. As a consequence, scholars' absorption in the informational treasure-houses created by electronic resources remains espoused to the view that we anticipate a future that will witness Victorian poetry's own sense of a future—a...