Poetry, Politics, Possibilities

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• Poetry, Politics, Possibilities
• Monique R. Morgan (bio)

My title is meant both as an homage to the subtitle of Isobel Armstrong’s foundational study, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics, and as an evocation of the possibilities this group of scholars saw twenty years ago and those we see today. In preparing to write this essay, I reread the “Whither Victorian Poetry?” 2003 special issue and I was struck by three things. First, the topics and methodologies most frequently called for by the issue’s contributors became important trends in the field in the intervening twenty years. Second, two of the most important current methods in the field—anti-racist scholarship and ecocriticism—were much less frequently mentioned in the issue. Third, many contributors expressed a sense of crisis, both within academic institutions and in global politics, and our sense of crisis has only become more urgent in 2023.

I’ll start with the good news: the ways in which our predictions have come to fruition and the collective accomplishments of scholars writing about Victorian poetry. In the contributions to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” we can find several topics that were foregrounded in multiple essays, including Victorian poetry’s relations to genre (both to specific poetic genres and to the novel), to other media (especially painting and photography), and to book history, print culture, and periodicals. Several essays called for greater attention to issues of periodization and to the long nineteenth century. I do not have space in this essay to recognize properly the abundant and important work that has been done in the past two decades on these topics. Instead, I will foreground a few examples of recent work on two other topics that frequently occurred in “Whither Victorian Poetry?” and are topics with which my own work has engaged: New Formalism and Victorian women poets.

In my 2003 essay, I praised an emerging scholarly movement in which “[c]lose attention to formal features is seen as crucial to an understanding of a text’s social and political meanings, and poems are viewed not as univocal conveyors of an (implicit or explicit) ideological content, but rather as sites of exploration and contestation of (sometimes [End Page 507] incompatible) views.”¹ Several other contributors also noted this movement and cited Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry (1993) and Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges (1997) as foundational texts, but there was not yet a consensus on what to call this new movement. I, rather awkwardly, called it “politically inflected formalism” (p. 502). Jason Rudy borrowed the term “neoformalism” from Herbert Tucker and adopted the phrase “cultural neoformalism” as one possible label for a developing methodology that “takes literary form as a subtle and often neglected vehicle for broader cultural forces.”² Three years later, there was still no consensus. Caroline Levine endorsed an approach called “strategic formalism”; in his response to Levine, Herbert Tucker instead offered the phrase “tactical formalism.”³ Marjorie Levinson’s 2007 essay “What Is New Formalism?” helped solidify the now-common name for the movement, though she divided it into two subtypes and reserved the term “activist formalism” for the strain that “makes a continuum with new historicism.”⁴ In my own sense of the term, New Formalism necessarily allies itself with the political concerns of New Historicism and cultural studies, though other formalist approaches may not.

Despite any disagreements about nomenclature, New Formalism has made important strides in the last two decades. A renewed interest in form likely had a diffusive effect in inspiring important recent studies of Victorian poetic genres, such as the sonnet sequence, the dramatic monologue, the long poem, and the verse-novel, each of which attends to these genres’ cultural contexts and implications.⁵ Perhaps the most exemplary work in New Formalist approaches to Victorian studies has been done by Isobel Armstrong, Caroline Levine, and Herbert Tucker. Armstrong has published numerous articles in this journal, and her Victorian Poetry (1993) continues to be vitally relevant, as evinced by the roundtable in honor of the book’s thirtieth anniversary at the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2023 conference. Levine’s ambitious Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network attempts to broaden the definition of form to...