Reflections on Twenty Years in Victorian Poetry

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• Reflections on Twenty Years in Victorian Poetry
• Stephanie Kuduk Weiner (bio)

When I received the invitation to contribute to this special issue, I did three things. Inspired by John Lamb’s idea, borrowed from Tim Ingold, that “we know as we go, not before we go,” I diagrammed my journey as a scholar and teacher over the last twenty years.¹ Then I read the whole “Whither Victorian Poetry?” special issue from 2003 and most of the articles that have appeared in Victorian Poetry in the last five years. I was curious: Where did we think we were headed, back then, and where are we now? This essay is about the observations that arose from this non-exhaustive, admittedly idiosyncratic bit of research. In a nutshell, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” was amazingly prescient of what came afterward, for me personally and for scholars in the field as a whole. It was fascinating to see how our concerns of 2003 reverberated from 2018–2023. I also saw more clearly how my own journey tacked back and forth between scholarship and teaching, and how my orientation toward the field has shifted from looking for gaps to gravitating toward energetic conversations.

Whither Points the Way

I was most struck in turning back to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” by how fully it predicted what looks in retrospect like a big methodological shift in our field. In the special issue, many contributors called on us to “attend to both historical context and the processes of signification,” as Anne Hartman put it.² There was an excitement in 2003, which I certainly remember sharing but had since forgotten, about bringing together historicist and formalist approaches to literary interpretation. The excitement can be felt in descriptions of this methodology as innovative and as gaining steam, for example in Monique R. Morgan’s essay: “We are witnessing the beginnings of a new trend in literary criticism, one that respects both the formal structures and the social contexts of poems” (p. 500). Jason R. Rudy agreed: “we can now imagine techniques of formal analysis that bring to literary texts the direct opposite of New Critical decontextualization” by “tak[ing] literary form as a subtle and often [End Page 445] neglected vehicle for broader cultural forces” (p. 590). Now I don’t think Victorian poetry scholars feel any need to justify this approach! We just do this kind of thing—or not—investigating formal and historical questions on their own or (more often) together, without making a big deal about it. For me, to encounter this moment in the methodological history of our field afresh was like meeting the college-age child of an old friend, giving me a surprising, sudden sense that twenty years is actually a long time, a span in which a lot can change.

How did we think we should unify historicist and formalist analysis in practice at that time? A key answer seems to have been the approach now sometimes called “historical poetics.” As Charles LaPorte wrote, “[f]uture criticism . . . seems likely to . . . demonstrat[e] the complexity of the relation between nineteenth-century literary ideology and praxis” by showing “how far poetic ideologies and practices determined one another” in historically specific ways (p. 519). LaPorte emphasized the mutual shaping of ideas about poetry and of practices of writing and reading. And since both ideas and practices of poetry in the Victorian period were shaped by other spheres of life, from politics and work to theology and science, this relation between ideology and practice was complex indeed. Many articles in recent volumes of Victorian Poetry fit inside this big tent. My favorites include two virtuosic essays by Ewan Jones on rhythm and on “arabesque” patterning, Lee Behlman on light verse, Kirstie Blair on “inspirational verse,” Seán Hewitt on nature description in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Casie Legette on anthologies of poetic “gems,” and Harriet Kramer Linkin on Welsh nationalist poetics in Hopkins and Felicia Hemans.³

More generally, it seems to me that we have signed on to Erik Gray’s program for a “criticism that treats Victorian poetry as an integral part of wider traditions” rather than as a “strictly bounded field” (p. 470). Gray was interested...