Victorian Poetry in an Age of Cultural Secularization

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• Victorian Poetry in an Age of Cultural Secularization
• Charles LaPorte (bio)

Twenty years ago, as a graduate student about to test the academic job market, I was thrilled to be invited to speculate about the future of Victorian poetry alongside a set of brilliant early-career scholars. Looking back on that special issue today as a middle-aged professor, I again find myself gratified by the brilliancy of my colleagues, most of whose essays have aged beautifully. My own contribution to that special issue, by contrast, has aged less well, partly because I took for granted the ongoing institutional health of the humanities in twenty-first-century higher education. Anyone who has been paying attention to public discourses about education in the intervening years (at least in the States) will likely share my new-found disquietude. I retain hope for the future of our field, believing in poetry as I do, but the future brings real challenges ahead that I will address in the second half of this essay.

In that 2003 essay, I celebrated and looked forward to new possibilities afforded by online databases to turbocharge our study of Victorian poetic culture and poetic subcultures. I pointed out that we could better understand “poetry as a specific cultural behavior” when we had better access to the specific ways that Victorian poetry and poetic commentary first circulated.¹ I prophesied that

present and future online database research will not only revolutionize the way that we conceive of the Victorian cultural tradition, but it will create a more egalitarian worldwide scholarly community by making available good reproductions of rare books, manuscripts, and periodicals.

(p. 523)

Ultimately, as I reasoned, our academic field would be galvanized by the literary sociology of a thousand Pierre (or Pierrette) Bourdieus, tracing the context of poetry and its circulation across the world in a print network of meaning that we could then study from any number of angles, from the global (What [End Page 561] kinds of poems appear in English-language newspapers in mid-century Manchester? 1870s Ontario? fin-de-siècle Bengal?) to the granular (How does such-and-such a coterie magazine lay out its filler poetry from decade to decade?). Victorian poetry itself seemed to be exploding outward into endless enchanting possibilities. In meaningful ways, it is doing so still.

It is now hard for me to look back at my prophecy of a future “egalitarian worldwide scholarly community” without cringing, however. In reality, literary research databases have been neither uniformly “egalitarian” nor “worldwide.” For instance, when the COVID-19 lockdown closed university libraries, deep-pocketed institutions pivoted quickly to HathiTrust for copyrighted books because their libraries could afford the subscription. But most institutions across the world were not able to do so. Online databases like the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry database cost too much for most institutions, even in a relatively affluent North American context. Then, too, my words smack embarrassingly of early-aughts tech optimism, such as the once-widespread impression that social media would bring the world community together (instead of, for example, degrading political discourse and incubating novel forms of hate and political polarization).

For reasons that I do not fully understand, the humanities are less trusted now than in 2003, and my younger self would be aghast at how frequently universities themselves are now discussed as little more than job training centers. Things seem to have become less stable, rather than more. And perhaps it is telling that The Chronicle of Higher Education’s apocalyptic essay collection Endgame: Can Literary Studies Survive? from 2020 singles out Victorian poetry as Exhibit A in its opening salvo:

The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. . . . Aspirants to the field have almost no professorial prospects; practitioners, especially those who advise graduate students, must face the uneasy possibility that their professional function has evaporated.²

The Chronicle, of course, overstates things for rhetorical effect. I know fine scholars of Victorian poetry who have landed tenure-line...