Reading Victorian Poetry as the World Burns

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• Reading Victorian Poetry as the World Burns
• Marion Thain (bio)

I write this in summer 2023 as an unprecedented heatwave burns up nearby southern Europe and beyond. Climate change has become a frightening reality in data that has already, this year, provided evidence of endless “firsts” or “highests.” In this context, why read Victorian poetry? Who cares, and why should anyone care? This is a particularly pertinent question to ask at the sixtieth anniversary of the journal Victorian Poetry, whose leadership has shaped the field under the fine stewardship of John Lamb, and which is about to pass to a new editor-in-chief.

In the 2002 issue (revisited in this present issue), I wrote about the category of “women’s poetry”: what is a “woman poet” and, crucially, how did that concept develop historically.¹ More specifically, how did the idea of women’s poetry frame engagement with the writing and reception of poetry by women in the nineteenth century? And how might we usefully trouble the deceptively unified category of “women’s poetry”? Pointing out that the category was not always being used as a biological-sex-based category (Alfred Miles’s well known anthology, I noted, included the work of female poets in volumes other than the one specifically devoted to “women’s poetry”), I concluded that women’s poetry was, in the late nineteenth century, as much a genre-based category as a gender-based one. What might we learn from exploring this late-nineteenth century gender taxonomy at the present moment, in which the nature of the category “woman” is (at least in some quarters) much discussed? That analysis of the concept of “women’s poetry” in 2002 has gained a potential whole new relevance as the categories of “women’s sport” and “women’s toilets” have become contentious in recent years. The recognition of the highly constructed nature of the categories of poetess and the “woman poet” provides a foundation and touchstone for the questions that are now being asked about gender identity: about the multiplicity of identities within and across categories, and the way those categories are inhabited. We are once again, and in a new way, at a moment when the issue of gender categorization is relevant and important [End Page 543] in public discourse. At the same time as the concept of “woman writer” is necessarily being explored afresh, a number of talented new scholars are working on the formation of trans-identity discourses in late nineteenth-century literature. The late nineteenth-century moment in which sexology, psychoanalysis, and the queer identities of decadence were providing new discourses and taxonomies for gender and sexuality is a moment that needs to be read in relation to the attempts of our current age to find ways of articulating a diversity of experiences. As ever, we look back in order to be able to look forward more effectively, and in a more informed way; both learning from the past and putting current thinking in a broader frame.

That’s one significant way in which the field I was exploring in 2002 is still highly relevant but has been given a new urgency and a new direction. I will not speak for those undertaking this new work on gender identity in relation to poets such as “Michael Field”; it is for this new generation of scholars to bring forward their insights and to show us why and how work in this field will continue to develop. What I’m going to focus on in this essay is a broader issue about the discipline of literary studies that underpinned my 2002 contribution in a way that was implicit yet constitutive. This is an issue of methodology, and specifically the role that “close reading” played in that article. Half of that article was a close reading of just one short poem: a display of a method that is fairly distinctive to our discipline, and one that could not be further from the quantitative and/or big data methods that are the bread-and-butter of STEM subjects—and one whose value is, therefore, in danger of being out of tune with the current age. Yet close reading...