Women and Light Verse: On May Kendall

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• Women and Light Verse: On May Kendall
• Lee Behlman (bio)

Several years ago, I wrote in Victorian Poetry about the long history and shifting critical conceptions of light verse, or what for much of the nineteenth century was called vers de société.¹ This was verse typically set in a refined social milieu, with a male speaker, and having the qualities of what one nineteenth-century critic, Frederic Locker-Lampson, called “brevity and buoyancy.”² Exploring the work of practitioners and critics of the form, I noted that a specifically comic register, while never excluded, was not viewed as its essential characteristic until the early twentieth century. Before then, vers de société “dwelled in a conceptual middle ground defined by balance and detachment—emotional, formal, even philosophical,” including “an Enlightenment-era aesthetic of poised, ‘polished’ form; an emotional tenor set between raucous humor and tragedy; and a philosophic position of detachment from and acceptance of life’s suffering.”³ That essay became a point of departure for a broader exploration of the critical potential for the study of verse as an alternative to its ostensibly more elevated counterpart, poetry, that I undertook with Olivia Loksing Moy. In the introduction to our edited collection, Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life (2023), we offer what we term “verse studies” as a framework for engaging with the vast poetic output of the nineteenth century, in order “to counter critical tendencies that have long narrowed our curricula and our scholarly practices.”⁴ Our contributors explore such subjects as the crucial periodical contexts for most Victorian verse production as well as verse forms such as ballades and rondels, hymns, children’s poetry, comic verse published in Punch and Fun, working-class and colonial ballads, and sonnets written for parlor games.

A pathway that I’d like to offer here for verse studies is to return to the subject of specifically light verse—a vast corpus that, with the notable exception of recent work on nonsense verse, remains underexplored⁵—in a different context: How did women poets, who increasingly adopted new [End Page 531] authorial personas as the influence of the poetess tradition began to wane in the later nineteenth century, take up the mantle of lightness? I’ve selected a signal example to explore, the poet May Kendall (1861–1943), a figure invoked by Marion Thain in a notable essay from the first Whither Victorian Poetry? special issue. In 2003, after a recent wave of scholarship recovering the work of non-canonical Victorian women poets, Thain used May Kendall to frame the question “What Kind of a Critical Category Is ‘Women’s Poetry?’”⁶ Thain’s answer was pragmatic. In short, it should be maximally expansive, to cover the full range of topics addressed, personas adopted, and formal modes applied and innovated in the nineteenth century. As she noted then, the crucial period of expansion was the 1880s and 1890s, when women poets increasingly operated outside of the constraints of common poetess topoi such as domesticity, Christian consolation, and wrecked romance. She suggested that whenever we hear it, we translate the term “women’s poetry” into “women’s poetries,” explicitly acknowledging the multiple gendered positions that these figures assumed, especially in the last two decades of the century (p. 582). I’m seeking here to take up Thain’s invitation by exploring an aspect of Kendall’s verse not addressed in Thain’s essay: Kendall’s variant adaptations of modes of “lightness” in her early poetry, including the volumes Dreams to Sell (1887) and Songs from Dreamland (1894).⁷ In both of these collections, Kendall adapts and reworks the typically masculine territory of light verse for her own ends, treating the latest scientific subjects.

Kendall’s proficiency as a comic poet was recognized in her own time: as Thain notes in Alfred Henry Miles’s The Poets and Poetry of the Century (his 10-volume anthology series published in the 1890s), Kendall was the only female poet included in the volume devoted to “Humour, Society, Parody and Occasional Verse”; all other women poets were confined to the volumes dedicated to poetry by women or on religious verse. When we compare...