Abstract
The 1820s and 1830s saw the rise of two kinds of poetry that have often been placed in opposition: the commercial success of a ‘feminine’ poetry associated especially with Letitia Landon and Felicia Hemans, and the rise of poetry of high metrical complexity that foreshadows later Victorian experiments. Stewart places these two kinds of poetry in contact, considering them through the lens of recent critical interest in book history and print culture, and the rise of ‘New Formalism’ and the historical study of metre. The chapter studies books of poetry by Letitia Landon and George Darley before concluding with discussion of the young Robert Browning, and suggests that these two seemingly opposed forms of poetry mirror each other.
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Notes
- 1.
Merriam, Edward Moxon: Publisher of Poets, 26.
- 2.
For example, H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia, and William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.
- 3.
Derek Attridge, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry, 9. Attridge points out that linguists and scholars of other languages have always taken a greater interest in metrical matters.
- 4.
Charles Mahoney, ed. A Companion to Romantic Poetry, 4. See also Alan Rawes, ‘Romantic Form and New Historicism’, Richard Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry, and Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges.
- 5.
Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network.
- 6.
See Levine’s ‘Strategic Formalism: Towards a New Method in Cultural Studies’, and Tucker’s ‘Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine’. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, 118.
- 7.
McGann, The Textual Condition, 77.
- 8.
Rudy, ‘On Cultural Neoformalism, Spasmodic Poetry, and the Victorian Ballad’, 590.
- 9.
Cronin, Reading Victorian Poetry, 65.
- 10.
See Phelan, The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry; Hall, ed., Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century; Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics; Prins, ‘Voice Inverse’; and Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930.
- 11.
J. S. Mill, ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’, from Monthly Repository, January and October 1833: Collected Works, 1: 348.
- 12.
The relation between poetry and popular publishing forms foreshadows, though in a distinct context, the illustrated books of the 1860s discussed by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875.
- 13.
Jewsbury, Phantasmagoria, 1: 41.
- 14.
‘Civilization’ (1836) in Mill, Collected Works, 18: 134, 135.
- 15.
Hazlitt, Complete Works, 20: 209.
- 16.
Johnson, Life of Milton in Lives of the Poets, 1: 294.
- 17.
Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry; Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext; Peter Simonsen, Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts; and Derek Attridge, Moving Words (203–21) provide insightful discussions of the broader theoretical issues at stake. Richard Cronin identifies Byron’s Don Juan as signalling a cultural shift that raises questions of value: ‘Don Juan may be the first major English poem designed from the first to be read silently, to be encountered not through the voice, but on the page, as type’ (Paper Pellets, 122).
- 18.
Herbert Tucker, ‘Of Monuments and Moments’, 287.
- 19.
Tucker, ‘Of Monuments and Moments’, 287.
- 20.
Christie, ‘A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty’.
- 21.
See Nicholas Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism, for an insightful discussion of William Jerdan’s brilliant series of advertising tricks that established the ‘L. E. L.’ brand. Mason shows that Jerdan’s most successful trick was to exaggerate the initial popularity of Landon’s verse to create a public sensation for her.
- 22.
See Daniel Riess, ‘Laetitia Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism’, 815, and St Clair, Reading Nation, 615–6.
- 23.
References are to the third edition, The Improvisatrice and Other Poems by L. E. L. (London: Hurst, Robinson and Co, 1825). I have consulted Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess, eds. Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, which reprints much, but not all, of the book.
- 24.
Blackwood’s 16 (August 1824), 190, 193.
- 25.
Mudie, Babylon the Great, 2: 56–8.
- 26.
Gentleman’s Magazine 94.2 (July 1824), 62.
- 27.
New Monthly Magazine 32 (July 1831), 546. Benjamin Disraeli called her ‘a sub-urban Sappho, foundress of the INITIAL SCHOOL’ in 1826 (quoted by Mason, 99).
- 28.
Literary Gazette 389 (3 July 1824), 420.
- 29.
Westminster Review 7 (January 1827), 57. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals attributes this review to John Arthur Roebuck.
- 30.
Westminster Review 7 (January 1827), 61.
- 31.
Literary Magnet 2 (July 1824), 107.
- 32.
On Landon’s covert critique of commercialised femininity, see Riess, ‘Laetitia Landon’; Katherine Montwieler, ‘Laughing at Love: L. E. L. and the Embellishment of Eros’; Jill Rappoport, ‘Buyer Beware: The Gift Poetics of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’. Angela Leighton puts it well in claiming that Landon’s version of commodified femininity has ‘depths of knowledge lying out of the eye’s easy reach’: Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, 69.
- 33.
McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility, 4, 170.
- 34.
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, 9. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique offers a helpful theoretical analysis of these debates about theories of reading.
- 35.
Hazlitt, Complete Works, 20: 297.
- 36.
Mudie, Babylon the Great, 2: 58. Glennis Stephenson, Letitia Landon, 123.
- 37.
Stephenson, Letitia Landon, 122.
- 38.
Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs, 135.
- 39.
Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 98.
- 40.
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 4.
- 41.
See also ‘The Hall of Statues’ (1831) in McGann and Riess. A remarkable number of the poems in The Improvisatrice include people who become statues, or who look at them. Beyond the examples I have quoted, see ‘St George’s Hospital, Hyde-Park Corner’ (‘his brow in death/Wore its pale marble look of cold defiance’ [ll. 74–5]) and ‘Roland’s Tower. A Legend of the Rhine’ (‘Roland stood/Like marble, cold, and pale, and motionless’ [ll. 165–6]).
- 42.
‘A History of the Lyre’, ll. 432–6, in The Venetian Bracelet (1828), in McGann and Riess.
- 43.
See Andrew Bennett, Romanticism and the Culture of Posterity: ‘It is in the poetry of Letitia Landon that the feminine counter-discourse of the Romantic culture of posterity is most fully explored’ (81).
- 44.
‘Erinna’ in The Golden Violet (1826), in McGann and Riess.
- 45.
Both poems are in The Venetian Bracelet (1828), in McGann and Riess.
- 46.
Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, 245.
- 47.
Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, 248.
- 48.
‘The Tomb of Romeo and Juliet’, Literary Souvenir (1826), 51.
- 49.
Gary Kelly points out how often Felicia Hemans puns on record’s etymological connection to cor/cordis, the heart: Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose and Letters, 29.
- 50.
Abbott, ed., Life and Letters of George Darley, 124.
- 51.
Darley uses ‘nepenthe’ in the poem largely as Shelley did in The Triumph of Life, to signify an elixir that permits transcendence, though he also alludes to its etymology. See Selected Poems of George Darley, ed. Anne Ridler, 238, 240. Further references are abbreviated to Ridler.
- 52.
Darley to John Taylor, 4 July 1835: Abbott, ‘Further letters of George Darley (1795–1846)’, 45.
- 53.
There is relatively little recent criticism of Darley, and what there is tends to consider him as a poet defeated by his belated status. See Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins, 184, and Harold Bloom, Visionary Company, 446.
- 54.
‘Effeminate passionist’ is in a letter to Miss Neail, 30 January 1830, in Abbott, Life and Letters, 28; Darley, ‘Fifth Letter to the Dramatists of the Day’, London Magazine 8 (November 1823), 537. See Michael Bradshaw, ‘“Bloody John Lacy”: George Darley and the Doldrums of English Drama’. As these comments indicate, Darley had an odd attitude to gender . His poems, as Richard Cronin argues (Romantic Victorians, 97–100), are more ‘feminine’ than many annual poems, yet he attempts to distance himself from Landon and others constantly. His advice to a poet is that if he includes ‘sufficient puling and namby-pamby, he is sure to have all the ladies on his side, —the ladies of both sexes’: The Labours of Idleness (1826), 75.
- 55.
Darley, ‘The Characteristic of the Present Age of Poetry’, London Magazine 9 (April 1824), 425.
- 56.
Hunt, Imagination and Fancy, 277. Hunt said that Darley ‘had not only a fine ear, but a profound sense both of the formative and modulative necessity of verse to poetry, as the shaper of emotions into all their analogous beauty’ (Hunt, Selected Works, 4: 288).
- 57.
Mudie, Babylon the Great, 2: 57. Whitman quoted in Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 312.
- 58.
To Richard Monckton Milnes, 23 November 1836, in Abbott, Life and Letters, 202. The poem is Tennyson’s ‘St Agnes’, later called ‘St Agnes’ Eve’. Like many antagonists of the annuals, Darley found it no contradiction to contribute to them. Andrew Boyle lists nine contributions by Darley in An Index to the Annuals.
- 59.
Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, 3: 147.
- 60.
Abbott, Life and Letters, 122.
- 61.
For a discussion of Pater, aestheticism, and its impurity, see Leighton, On Form, 74–98.
- 62.
Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life, 466.
- 63.
Cronin, Romantic Victorians, 98.
- 64.
The reference to albums is at 2:1:102; to habeas corpus at 5:9:204.
- 65.
The Labours of Idleness, 9–10.
- 66.
Heath-Stubbs, The Darkling Plain, 29.
- 67.
I have used a first edition held at Palace Green Library, University of Durham, though canto and line references are to Ridler’s edition.
- 68.
See Leighton, On Form, 20–28.
- 69.
Darley, The Errors of Ecstasie, 19.
- 70.
Poetry’s second-hand creation is a common theme in Darley. The Errors of Ecstasie reflects constantly on it. The ‘Mystic’ poet addresses the moon, refers to her ‘pale fire’, and begs ‘But come! Wilt answer without parody/Of poetry; itself a parody/Of plain propriety?’ (22).
- 71.
Quoted by Ridler, 241.
- 72.
Letter to Mitford, 22 August 1836, in Abbott, Life and Letters, 149.
- 73.
Darley, The Labours of Idleness, 3, 12, 15. One character has heard of poets that ‘the more disgusted their readers grew, they themselves became the more ravished in proportion’ (74). The narrator may have no readers, but this contrived disgust is not a stance he celebrates.
- 74.
Taylor, note to Act 1, Scene 1, 277–9.
- 75.
Hunt quoted these lines in his review of Browning’s Paracelsus; ‘The lines of the present poem must also be traced with the aid of other light than that reflected from sun or lamp’: Hunt, Selected Works, 3: 314.
- 76.
Thomas Wade’s work is an especially useful example from Browning’s circle: see The Poems and Plays of Thomas Wade, ed. John L. McLean.
- 77.
Quoted in Britta Martens, Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy, 18.
- 78.
Fox’s review in The Monthly Repository, in Litzinger and Smalley, eds., Browning: The Critical Heritage, 35.
- 79.
Linda Peterson, ‘Robert Browning’s Debut: Ambition Expressed, Ambition Denied’, 464.
- 80.
The poem has the merit ‘de donner une idée assez précise du genre qu’elle n’a fait qu’ébaucher’.
- 81.
Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 54.
- 82.
Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 84.
- 83.
The Talfourd anecdote is discussed in the introduction to the Longman edition, The Poems of Robert Browning, 1: 112. Further references are to this edition, which is based on the 1835 first edition. The anecdote has become something of a myth. The details may not strictly be accurate (Wordsworth had probably left before Browning was toasted), though it captures well the sense that Browning was regarded as an emergent voice in poetry circles. Keats letter to Brown, 14 August 1820: The Letters of John Keats, 2: 321.
- 84.
Foster’s review in The Examiner, Browning: The Critical Heritage, 41.
- 85.
Leigh Hunt, Selected Works, 3: 314.
- 86.
The image recalls a famous exchange concerning Browning’s ‘obscurity’ with Ruskin. Ruskin describes Browning as a glacier, ‘so full of Clefts that half the journey has to be done with ladder & hatchet’; Browning responds by making the poem the glacier over which the reader and writer pick their way (quoted by Tucker, Browning’s Beginnings, 11).
- 87.
Clara Dawson, ‘Sordello and the Poetics of Reception’, 151.
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Stewart, D. (2018). ‘A Labyrinth of Difficulties and Distinctions’: Landon, Darley, Browning. In: The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70512-5_4
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