Introduction: The Place of Victorian Poetry

Abstract

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• Introduction: The Place of Victorian Poetry
• John B. Lamb

“The future of poetry is immense.” So claimed Matthew Arnold in “The Study of Poetry” originally published in 1880 as the general introduction to The English Poets, edited by T. H. Ward. Arnold went on to encourage his readers to “conceive of [poetry] as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete.”¹

“The Study of Poetry” is perhaps most notable not for those English poets Arnold excludes from the narrow confines of the “classic”—Chaucer, Pope, Burns, and all the Romantics save Wordsworth—but for those he fails to mention at all, those contemporary Victorian poets whose major work was published by 1880. However, the study of the Victorian poets Arnold consigns to the hinterlands of literary history, as well as their fin-de-siècle compatriots, has since 1963 found its place in Victorian Poetry.

Today, Arnold’s proscriptions may seem to us, as they did to some of his contemporaries, more like an act of border control designed “not just to distinguish but to keep apart.” As the philosopher Edward Casey suggests, “Every border is constructed such that it is closed or subject to closure.” But a boundary, Casey maintains, is “intrinsically permeable; it is porous by its very nature.”² Boundaries have an “inherent openness and vagueness of spatial extent”;³ and the ever-expanding boundaries of nineteenth-century poetry and its study are once again charted in this issue, “Whither Victorian Poetry Redux.”

Certain forms of critical practice, not only during the nineteenth century but also in our own era of book banning and the unrelenting assault on the humanities, appear committed to shoring up the allegedly porous borders of literary and cultural history--some may cross but others may not. But for the past six decades Victorian Poetry, led by a committed and always insightful band of scholars, has been mining the rich repositories of nineteenth-century [End Page 433] poetry while at the same time undermining the borders—those cultural and institutional walls still prevalent today—that would consign poetry and its study to permanent exile.

In a discussion of the work of the writer and naturalist Richard Mabey, the geographer Hayden Lorimer notes, “What Mabey’s work seems to exemplify is a certain way of carrying yourself into the craft of study: where the shape of a topic cannot be said to exist, but rather to occur in the act.”⁴ But all too often, particularly in the age of STEM, academic inquiry and the pedagogy it underwrites is driven by the logic of transport; it is, in the words of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, “destination oriented,” concerned more with the terminus than the journey.⁵ But if we apply Ingold’s concept of wayfaring to the craft of literary study, to the study of poetry, we might see that study as part of a “continual engagement with the field of practice”—here, for our purposes, literary and cultural inquiry.⁶ Pushing the metaphor further, we might say that the scholar as wayfarer comes to know what they do by moving around freely (sometimes even wandering) in a certain intellectual and aesthetic environment, and the “map” of that journey is a meshwork of the paths of inquiry they and others have followed. For Ingold, wayfaring is a way of thinking and knowing or “thinking in movement,”⁷ and such movement, as the essays gathered in this issue attest, alternates between recollection and anticipation. As Ingold says, “we know as we go, not before we go.”⁸ It is in such wayfaring, Rebecca Solnit reminds us, that we can encounter the “unpredictable and incalculable.” New places, be they geographical, aesthetic, or intellectual, “offer up new thoughts, new possibilities.”⁹

Wishing to contemplate a landscape of new possibilities at the close of 2003, Victorian Poetry published a special issue, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” guest edited by Linda K. Hughes. That issue brought together...