Christ, Carol. Victorian & Modern Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984.
Many critics of Victorian poetry “assimilat[e] Victorian poetry to a Romantic tradition in…that the poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as a poetry of experience” (2). [re: Langbaum]
“Both Arnold and Tennyson use myth and legend to attain a resonance and objectivity greater than mere personal emotion could offer. Browning and Tennyson evolve forms of the dramatic monologue to separate the poet from the poem and thus objectify its presentation of personality. Likewise the chief Modernist poets seek an objective basis for poetry’s presentation of emotion… Like the Victorians, he [Eliot] uses the dramatic monologue extensively, and he seeks first in myth, then in orthodox Christianity, an objective means of structuring and evaluating the particulars of history” (3).
“Even Yeats, the most Romantic of the Modernists, uses the supernatural to validate mask and symbol. Like the Victorians, the Modernists modify their Romantic heritage by seeking a more objective basis for poetic discourse. In so doing they evolve poetic strategies that resemble those of the Victorians: constructs of mask and persona which, like the Victorian dramatic monologue, distance the poem from the poet; theories of image and symbol which identify sensuous perception with the qualities of objects themselves; theories of language which emphasize its transparency as a medium for sensation; structures of myth and history which provide a narrative that contains and gives significance to personalities. Despite their anti-Victorianism, Modernist poets explore ways of objectifying poetry that show striking continuity with Victorian poetics” (3).
“The Victorians and the Modernists, as we shall see, react with varying degrees of discomfort to the Romantic conception of the imagination, but they are nonetheless concerned in their poetry with mental acts” (4).
“The focus upon mental action and upon the image shows how central the relationship of subject and object is to Romantic poetry and thought. In the classic statement of Romantic poetics, M. H. Abrams argues that the Romantics understand the activity of the perceiving mind not as a mirror reflecting the external world but as a lamp projecting its light, creating as it sees, and thus unifying subject and object” (4-5).
“The fear implicit in Romanticism that we may fail to know the objects of our consciousness, that we may realize only an eccentric and personal reality, motivates Victorian attempts to turn from what they perceive as a disabling focus upon the self” (5).
“The Victorians’ concern with what they feel are the dangers of Romantic subjectivity explains their various attempts to construct an epistemology which derives the feeling with which we respond to objects from the qualities of objects themselves” (6).
“Other Victorian artists share Arnold’s desire to verify feeling from the real qualities of objects”(7).
“The idea which both [Victorian and Modern] poets construct of Romanticism enables them to shift the burden of personality to a discredited past while it allows them to claim a more authoritative and objective foundation for their own poetics” (10).
“Much as the Victorians and the Modernists resist the limitation with which the poet’s personal voice seemed to restrict the poem, they far the dangers of a private and personal symbolism. Accordingly they strive to develop theories of the image in poetry which establish some objective ground for the feeling it generates… both Victorians and Modernists seek in tradition some objective structure to contain their dramatization of psychological experience” (12).
“…the break between the two periods has been exaggerated and the historical continuity obscured” (13).
The Modernist poets: “Each sees himself as rescuing poetry from Victorianism” (13).
“The origin of the dramatic monologue is a question of critical debate. Some writers treat it as a new form originating in the Victorian period; others trace it to varied precedents…” (16).
“In The Poetry of Experience, Robert Langbaum has given one important and suggestive answer to this question. The dramatic monologue, he argues, originates when the Victorian poet writes a Romantic lyric of experience in the voice of a character separate from his own. Like the Romantic lyric, the dramatic monologue contains a disequilibrium between experience and idea. The form forces upon us a conflict between sympathy and judgment. The conflict embodies the nineteenth-century poet’s conviction that imaginative apprehension gained through immediate experience is primary and certain, whereas the analytic reflection that follows is secondary and problematical. The way in which the dramatic monologue emphasizes the primacy of experience explains why twentieth-century poets also find the form so congenial and continue its development” (16).
[re: Browning’s “My Last Duchess”]
“The speaker’s desire for primacy and preeminence, what he calls his complete ‘commanding, for commanding’ (817), repeatedly fills him with self-revulsion at the same time that he is unable to dispossess himself of it…Browning responded to the conflict with which this egoism presented him by rejecting what seemed to him the subjective mode of Romantic confessional poetry for the more objective mode of the dramatic monologue. Whenever Browning described the dramatic nature of his poetry, he emphasized that his poems did not concern himself… By detaching these ‘utterances’ from his own person, he avoids presenting problems of self-consciousness in his own voice, but he remains preoccupied with such problems in the voices he creates” (19).
“Robert Langbaum has observed that dramatic monologues have no necessary beginnings and endings, but arbitrary limits. As Langbaum implies, the poems rarely progress; the speaker seldom reaches a realization by the end of the poem unavailable to him in the beginning. Rather, the form has a circling quality that reveals by its repetitions the fixed elements of the speaker’s identity… Browning thus uses the dramatic monologue to portray the ways in which the self circumscribes its world” (21).
“Browning thus stresses the historical moment, the contextual relativity, the evanescent quality of any lyrical utterance. His entire poetic enterprise in this way questions the nature and truth value of man’s speaking for himself. Donning mask after mask, Browning explores the extension and limits of egoism” (22).
“Browning solves the dilemma of speech’s lie by a spiritual vitalism which erupts through language though it is separate from it” (24).
“The form of the dramatic monologue thus allows Browning to mediate and control a number of related tensions. Because the dramatic monologue portrays an individual speaking at the same time that it composes a dramatic event, it can mediate between the subjective and the objective” (25).
“Tennyson’s poems, unlike Browning’s, Culler argues, do not attempt to show individuality of character but phases of passion. They intend no irony; they evoke only wonder at the power of the passion and the skill with which the poet has realized its display” (26).
“Tennyson’s poems do not contain the elaborate irony of Browning’s dramatic monologues, emphasizing the distance between the speaker’s actual words and our understanding of those words. But they do achieve irony of another sort. Tennyson uses either narrative or legend to associate his speakers with madness or delusion. The story of Maud, the place of the Lotos-Eaters in the Odyssey, the portrait of Ulysses in the Inferno, the history of Fatima all identify their characters with some derangement. Tennyson thus dissociates himself from the emotion he depicts and makes it appear dangerous, excessive, forbidden. By this dissociation, Tennyson, like Browning, uses the dramatic monologue to control and objectify the potential solipsism of personal vision” (26).
“Like Browning, [Tennyson] uses the dramatic monologue to explore the possibilities of solipsism which the Romantic imagination involves. The form offers him similar resources. By providing a means of objectifying self-absorption, it allows him to distance and control the dangers implicit for him in a poetry conceived as an allegory of the state of the poet’s mind” (28).
“Tennyson’s poems rarely alter the perspective of the stories they employ; rather they use it to control the exploration of dangerous emotion. Swinburne’s dramatic monologues, on the other hand, are often deliberately revisionary” (29).
“There was a growing conviction throughout the century, reflected in Tennyson’s and Browning’s dramatic monologues, that the self can know nothing but its own experiences” (30). (AD: vs. Modern pastiche of history)
“While Tennyson and Browning used the dramatic monologue both to express and evade the limitation of personality, Wilde uses the concept of the mask to transcend it. HE emphasizes not the poet’s distance from his voices, but the experience those voices allow him to encompass” (32).
“Wilde’s conception of the mask strikingly anticipates Modernist poetics. Modernist poets take a poetic form predominant in Victorian poetry and develop from it a systematic concept of voice which enables them at once to express and transcend the restriction which individual personality imposes and the historical and individual particularity which any poem possesses. Like Wilde, Modernist poets make of the concept of voice not merely a poetic strategy but an idea of personality that motivates poetic expression. In this, they develop the radical implications of Victorian poetic practice. Yeats, Pound, and Eliot each use an idea of persona to contain contradictions similar to those which the dramatic monologue expresses in Victorian poetry” (32).
“Yeats seeks personae that like the mask can give a supernatural authority to their words and that have access to emotions with a radical purity and energy to which he could not lay claim” (38).
“By constructing a lyric of multiple voices, Yeats can contain conflicts between particularcircumstance and eternal vision, subject and object, self and mask without forcing their resolution… In his project to relate personal imaginative energy to an eternal world of symbol, Yeats is essentially a Romantic” (40).
“Like Yeats, Pound attributes the difficulty in speaking in one’s own voice to an alienation from the surrounding culture. In an explanation of the origin of myth, he argues that myth arises from the need to objectify personal emotion in the face of an unbelieving audience…” (40). (AD: see “Gaudier-Brzka”)
“The elegiac moods which Tennyson’s and Eliot’s poems express display remarkably similar patterns. Like Tennyson, unlike Browning, Eliot does not engage his characters in mad projections of the will to control the world. Rather, his characters doubt that there can be meaningful interchange between the world and the self…” (47).
“There is a striking parallel between the avoidance of action in Eliot’s poetry and the avoidance of agency in his criticism, although they express opposing impulses” (49).
“In his preoccupation with the solipsism of the individual imagination and in his evasion of the connection between a poet and his personae, Eliot is the closest of the principal Modernist poets to the Victorian poetic tradition. Like Browning and Tennyson, he uses the dramatic monologue to express a fear that self-consciousness, far from offering the access to universals which the Romantic hoped, confirms the reality of man’s self-imprisonment” (50).
“In his essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets,’ Eliot criticizes the Victorians for a dissociation of thought and feeling. In one of his essays defining imagism, Pound complains that the Victorians made poetry ‘the ox-cart and post-chaise for transmitting thoughts poetic or otherwise.’ The ideal against which all three [Modernist] poets measure the achievement of the Victorians is a non-discursive poetry of the image. Yeats calls it pure poetry. Eliot calls it ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought.’ Pound calls it ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’ These three definitions have in common the insistence that ideas as ideas have no place in poetry, that poetry presents images that are themselves their meaning” (53).
“He [Tennyson] wishes not to involve the reader in the kind of understanding or reflection that a cognitively dense verbal medium encourages but to bring the reader to re-experience that moment when sensation and emotion seem one. His poetry anticipates impressionism in striving to combine sense impressions in such a way that it captures the very moment when sensation becomes feeling” (58). (AD: the same has been said of Modernist poetry: see Yeats slide.)
John Stuart Mill “praises Tennyson’s power ‘of creating scenery, in keeping with some state of human feeling; so fitted to it as to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state of feeling itself, with a force not to be surpassed by anything but reality” (60).
“Tennyson’s impressionism…involves a distrust of the cognitive element of language, but implies an enormous faith in the representational power of sound” (61).
“Like Tennyson in his early poetry, they want a poetry of sensation becoming emotion without discourse, and they have equivalent problems, I shall argue, in their search for some objective validation of the image. Only Yeats, I think, successfully overcame the split between subject and object that was the Victorian poetic heritage, and he did it by returning to the very that were anathema to Eliot and Pound–discourse and a Romantic theory of the imagination” (63).
“Yeats resolves the problem of the image in much the same way that he resolves the problem of voice. He still seeks the objectivity that characterizes modern poetry, but he incorporates the objective realm of symbols, like the mask, into a lyric of multiple voice whose organizing principle is the imagination. In contrast to Yeats, Eliot and Pound never evolve such a theory of the imagination. Much like the Victorians, they strive to create a poetics that gives objective equivalents and validation to feeling” (82).
“In discussing ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ [Pound] expresses his intention in the following way: ‘In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.’ I have already suggested in discussing Pound’s formulation in the context of the Victorian tradition that the statement contains an ambiguity in its verbs ‘transforms itself’ and ‘darts into.’ Like the Victorians, Pound assumes that objects have within themselves the power to produce specific emotional resonances which the artist manipulates” (93).
“In order to experience this impression appropriately, the reader must allow the images to ‘fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.’ Eliot here never mentions morality or ultimate conclusions; rather, poetry offers a ‘total effect,’ a sequence of impressions whose logic the reader can re-experience and thus understand” (146-7).
“Nonetheless, Modernist criticism of Victorian didacticism, like their criticisms of Victorian rhetoric, at once articulate a Romantic ideal of the way that poetry presents experience and express fears of its failure. Eliot’s definition of the act of reading, whereby the reader allows the images to impress themselves upon him in order to experience the ‘total effect,’ has precedents in Victorian poetics and roots in Romanticism” (147).
“Much as Arnold recommended, Modernist poets use the resources of poetry to create the lost cultural unity necessary to the psychological wholeness their earlier poetics envisions. Their attacks on Victorian didacticism, much like their attacks on Victorian rhetoric, express anger at the failure to attain the unified sensibility they desire. In their own turn toward the discursive definition of unified culture in their poetry, they paradoxically follow the pattern the Victorians had followed before them. The idea of Victorianism, then, provides the Modernists with a way of historically polarizing a conflict to which the goals of their own poetics ultimately lead them. They identify Victorian poetry with the didactic pressure which operates ultimately on them as well, while they identify Modernism with the ideal of the unified sensibility which we have seen as an important element of Victorian poetics. This historical polarization leads them to simplify much Victorian poetry…Although Victorian poetics contains many of the elements from which the Modernists were to build their poetic revolution, the Modernists characteristically misread Victorian poetry, identifying it with the failures which would most defeat their own enterprise” (149).
“One way of making it new, as Pound desired, was to create a caricature of the immediate past which could then be enlisted to prove one’s claim to modernity” (157).
A. L. Duck 