Victorian Women Poets

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• Victorian Women Poets
• Heather Bozant Witcher (bio)

What does it mean to read, analyze, and interpret poetry at varying scales? In 2018, Natalie Houston showed how humanities research problematizes questions of scale and noted that “[f]or Victorian studies, the problems of innumerable things and how to interpret them manifest doubly as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary methodological challenge” (Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3–4 (2018): 848–851, p. 848). Then, Houston argued that the digital invigorated our engagement with scale; now, in 2022, scholarship demonstrates that calls to “undiscipline” the field has revitalized conceptions of poetic scale and influence in the realm of women poets. This has meant more than simply considering global connections and bringing peripheral voices to the center. It has for studies of Victorian women poets meant asking new questions about familiar concepts, like the Poetess and lyric, to embrace new visions of poetry as social, multiple, and radical.

Looking backward, Elizabeth Helsinger’s latest monograph, Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth Century English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022) considers the rich inheritance of late eighteenth-century verse conversation upon Victorian forms to trace a different view of lyric history that incorporates the public, social world and a desire for reciprocity. In doing so, Helsinger also provocatively questions the implications for conversation in a twenty-first-century world marred by a global pandemic and growing political distrust. In the poems analyzed, conversations are events: either an event referred to within the poem or as a readerly experience. Helsinger thus contributes to the growing body of scholarship viewing poetry as a “social, and sociable, form” (p. 7). Although the majority of poets explored by Helsinger are canonically male (Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others), two chapters explore the conversational poetry of Christina Rossetti and Michael Field. Exploring the ekphrastic poetry of Michael Field, Helsinger interrogates the [End Page 417] encounter with visual art and “commodity relations” to repersonalize objects into something like conversation. Examining Rossetti’s ballads, Helsinger foregrounds Rossetti’s reworking of the eighteenth-century ballad tradition and its reliance on conversation. Rossetti’s spiritual dialogues imagine conversations that are at once promising and spiritually fulfilling: the anticipatory voice of God responds in the circular repetition of reciprocative poetic forms. Helsinger’s thoughtful close prosodic readings of these women poets offers new interpretations for situating Victorian poetry within a sociable and participatory light: poetry as meant to do something; poetry as active; poetry as responsive.

Possibly outside the realm of “women poets,” significant work continues to be uncovered and analyzed about working-class poets—at least insofar as these poets can be named. Exploring Victorian working-class poets is nothing new, thanks to the ongoing efforts of Florence Boos, Marcus Waithe, and Michael Sanders, among others; however, this year’s focus on poetry written during the Lancashire Cotton Famine offers insight into the complexity of transatlantic relationships, assembles the sheer wealth of poetry recently recovered and continuing to be retrieved from periodicals, and questions the function of poetry and its capacity to interrogate definitions of labor. Simon Rennie’s “[Re-] forming Cotton Famine Poetry—Some Implications” (Journal of Victorian Culture 27, no. 1 [2022]: 153–159) describes his attempts to create a digital archive of newspaper poetry written during the Cotton Famine, an economic crisis caused by a lack of US cotton imports during the American Civil War. In his discussion, Rennie identifies how the digital methodologies used by his project team expanded and problematized the geographic, temporal, and class boundaries of the Cotton Famine poetic tradition, illuminating global intersections with abolitionist politics and emigration rhetorics. Importantly, Rennie’s database, Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-5) (https://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/), blurs definitions of the working class: “I am confident that the project has recovered the voices of working people; it is just that in many cases I cannot identify these individual authors as ‘working class.’ I have increasingly begun to refer to the writers collectively as ‘ordinary people’” (p. 156). The discussion illuminates the intriguing—yet frustrating—aspects of building a database around a lack of identification of individual authors.

Eva Dema...