Abstract
This period saw a remarkable flourishing in ‘light verse’: poetry of high metrical polish that teetered on the brink between serious and comic poetry, and between high and low culture. Stewart presents them as a crucial element linking the ‘feminine’ poetry of the annuals and the ‘formalist’ poetry of the aesthetes. Focusing on Leigh Hunt, John Hamilton Reynolds, Thomas Hood, and Winthrop Mackworth Praed, this chapter claims the significance of this culture of poetry as a form of writing that tested out the seemingly ephemeral lightness of poetry. Rather than being simply frivolous, this culture of punning ‘light verse’ allowed poets to think, in often remarkably bleak ways, about the status of poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
Light verse has been defined very differently by W. H. Auden and Kingsley Amis in their Oxford Books of Light Verse. Although some of the poets I will discuss here appear in one or other of those anthologies, I do not wish to engage with their definitions but to allow the poets to develop their own version of lightness here.
- 2.
Blackwood’s 7 (August 1820), 520.
- 3.
See Moore, The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 1: 644. Hunt questioned this in his review in The Tatler (13 January 1831), 449–51, pointing to Moore’s praise of the poem, but in truth Moore was always interestingly mixed about it, as were many readers. See Letters, 1: 389–90 and Journal, 1: 142.
- 4.
See Jonathan Culler , ed., On Puns: The Foundation of Letters.
- 5.
Hood and Reynolds, ‘Ode to Mr Graham, The Aeronaut’, Odes and Addresses to Great People, 5.
- 6.
Sara Lodge, Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 78. The poem’s epigraph, from Wordsworth ‘To a Sky-Lark’, is given as being by ‘Wordsworth—on a Lark!’ (1).
- 7.
Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 124.
- 8.
Jackson, Those Who Write for Immortality, 144.
- 9.
Hunt, Autobiography, 311, 324. Both phrases are retained in the later Autobiography from Hunt’s 1828 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries.
- 10.
References to Hunt’s poetry are to John Strachan’s edition, volumes 5 and 6 of The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt; here 6: 76.
- 11.
Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings.
- 12.
References to Rimini are to canto and line numbers.
- 13.
Roe, Fiery Heart, 222.
- 14.
For example: Thomas Goggans , ‘Deferred Desire and the Management of Tone in Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini’ and Rodney Stenning Edgecombe , Leigh Hunt and the Poetry of Fancy.
- 15.
Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry, 184.
- 16.
Even Jeffrey Cox , one of Hunt’s most ardent recent celebrants, seems troubled by the question of quality: Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, 41.
- 17.
The Companion 4 (30 January 1828), 29.
- 18.
Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, 352.
- 19.
Roe, Fiery Heart, 222.
- 20.
Monthly Review 2nd series 130 (June 1816), 146; Blackwood’s 2 (November 1817), 198.
- 21.
Quarterly Review 14 (January 1816), 477. Clarke, An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, 8. For Clarke the charge could only have been made in an ‘anti-reformist Review’, but many of Hunt’s fellow moderate reformers found themselves similarly perplexed.
- 22.
Roe, ‘Introduction: Leigh Hunt’s Track of Radiance’, 6.
- 23.
The Indicator, 51 (27 September 1820), 402.
- 24.
The Companion, 29 (23 July 1828), 432.
- 25.
The Indicator, 31 (10 May 1820), 247.
- 26.
Thanks to Simon Kövesi for showing me a picture of it.
- 27.
Reynolds, Letters, 13.
- 28.
Wordsworth, Prose, 3: 80.
- 29.
For example, Poetry and Repression, 127. One might doubt, of course, whether the model helpfully explains Keats’s relationship with Wordsworth.
- 30.
Robinson, Unfettering Poetry, 216–17.
- 31.
Robinson, 208. Robinson claims, rightly, that Wordsworth’s poetry is itself often ‘low’; I don’t wish to make a straw man of Wordsworth, but rather to suggest that Reynolds’s poetry is not so happy to adopt a ‘low’ position as we might assume.
- 32.
Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 16–17.
- 33.
Reynolds, ‘Dedication, To—’, The Garden of Florence, v. The collection was published under the semi-pseudonym ‘John Hamilton’.
- 34.
Reynolds claims (The Fancy, 54) that it was written before the publication of Don Juan but that, like Byron’s poem, it was inspired by John Hookham Frere’s Whistlecraft.
- 35.
Lamb, ‘Popular Fallacies IX, That the Worst Puns are the Best’, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 2: 160–3.
- 36.
Lamb, ‘Distant Correspondents’, London Magazine 5 (March 1822), 284.
- 37.
For example, George L. Marsh, ed. John Hamilton Reynolds: Poetry and Prose, 48; Ian Jack , English Literature, 1815–1832, 151.
- 38.
Clare, Letters, 74.
- 39.
Clare, Autobiographical Writings, 133; Letters, 194.
- 40.
Clare, Autobiographical Writings, 134.
- 41.
Lodge, Thomas Hood, 141–2.
- 42.
In Whims and Oddities, in Prose and Verse; with Forty Original Designs (1826), hereafter Whims (First Series). I will mainly refer to the original volumes of Hood’s poetry and their appearances in annuals and magazines, but I have drawn on Selected Poems of Hood, Praed and Beddoes, eds. Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning, and Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, ed. John Clubbe.
- 43.
Lodge, Thomas Hood, 146, 63.
- 44.
Whims (First Series), v.
- 45.
On this tradition, see Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race.
- 46.
Stafford, 231.
- 47.
Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 135.
- 48.
Procter, letter to Thomas Forbes Kelsall, 25 March 1825, The Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. He is commenting on Odes and Addresses to Great People.
- 49.
The Letters of Thomas Hood: to Robert Balmanno, 23 March 1828, 96–8, and to Sir Thomas Lawrence, 16 November 1828, 113–14.
- 50.
Whims (First Series), 85. When the poem was first published in the London Magazine it came with a footnote, probably by Hood, noting that Clarence was not drowned in a butt of sack, but in ‘Malmsbury’: London Magazine 5 (May 1822), 424.
- 51.
‘Mary’ in Whims and Oddities, Second Series (1827), 16; ‘The Death-Bed’ appeared in The Englishman’s Magazine in August 1831, reprinted in Wolfson and Manning.
- 52.
First published in London Magazine, February 1823, then in Plea.
- 53.
In Plea and first published in Literary Souvenir (1827), 9.
- 54.
Odes and Addresses, 53. Hood dedicated the Second Series of Whims and Oddities ‘respectfully’ to Scott.
- 55.
Sara Lodge (Thomas Hood, 53–4) offers a thoughtful reading of poems including these in their London Magazine context. Placed in company with comic poems these poems of ‘limbo’ are, for her, jokes. This tends to overplay the London’s playfulness, I think, but I certainly agree that they are jokes, only that the jokes as they appear either in the London or Hood’s Plea are bleak as well as playful. See London Magazine 7 (June 1823), 636.
- 56.
Matthews, Poetical Remains, 189–221.
- 57.
The phrase is from ‘Sonnet: Silence’, the last lines of the last poem in Plea.
- 58.
Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life, 96.
- 59.
Derwent Coleridge, ‘Memoir’, The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed with a Memoir, 1: ix.
- 60.
‘Love at a Rout’, first published in The Etonian (1820), taken from The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed with a Memoir, ed. Derwent Coleridge, 1: 286, 288. There are no line numbers in this edition; further references are abbreviated to Coleridge. There is no complete edition of Praed’s poems. Where possible I refer to Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning’s Selected Poems of Hood, Praed and Beddoes, which prints the texts as they appeared in the magazines, newspapers, and annuals of their first appearance, and offers the most valuable and easily accessible introduction to him.
- 61.
‘Laura’, Wolfson and Manning, first published in The Etonian (1820).
- 62.
‘School and Schoolfellows’, Wolfson and Manning, first published London Magazine (March 1829).
- 63.
‘A Ballad: Teaching How Poetry is Best Paid For’, A Selection from the Works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, ed. Sir George Young, 6. Further references abbreviated to Young.
- 64.
‘The Story of Violette’, Young, 176.
- 65.
‘A Preface’ (1824), Select Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, ed. A. D. Godley, 49. Further references abbreviated to Godley.
- 66.
Hudson, A Poet in Parliament, 210.
- 67.
In Wolfson and Manning, unpublished in Praed’s lifetime.
- 68.
‘The County Ball’, Godley, 72.
- 69.
‘Good-Night to the Season’, ll. 97–108, Wolfson and Manning. First published in New Monthly Magazine (August 1827).
- 70.
Young, xxi.
- 71.
Mary Russell Mitford singled out ‘The Belle of the Ballroom’ as being ‘as true as if it had been written in prose by Jane Austen’ (Recollections, 96). Kingsley Amis makes a similar point: ‘We are dealing with a kind of realistic verse that is close to some of the interests of the novel: men and women among their fellows, seen as members of a group or class in a way that emphasizes manners, social forms, amusements, fashion (from millinery to philosophy), topicality, even gossip, all these treated in a bright, perspicuous style’ (The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, xviii).
- 72.
‘The Belle of the Ball-Room, An Every-day Character’, Wolfson and Manning, first published in the Literary Souvenir (1831).
- 73.
‘Lines; Written for a Blank Page of “The Keepsake”’, Wolfson and Manning.
- 74.
‘The Fancy Ball’, Wolfson and Manning. An earlier version appeared in the Hampshire Chronicle and Southampton Courier.
- 75.
A moraliser would note that this is what Praed did, changing from Whig (or even Radical) to Tory in the run-up to the Reform Bill, though he hadn’t done so by 1829. See Hudson’s A Poet in Parliament for an account of his politics.
- 76.
Quoted by Hudson, A Poet in Parliament, 62.
- 77.
‘Chaunt I’, l. 26; ‘Time’s Song’, New Monthly Magazine 17 (October 1826), 415; both in Wolfson and Manning.
- 78.
In Wolfson and Manning, ll. 35–6. The New Monthly had a habit of including reflections (usually in prose) on the cultural year just gone at the beginning of a new one; for example, James Smith, ‘Annus Mirabilis! Or a Parthian Glance at 1823’, New Monthly Magazine, 10 (January 1824), 10–16.
- 79.
‘My Own Funeral’ (1826), Coleridge, 1: 295.
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Stewart, D. (2018). ‘The Proper Pathetic Face’: Hunt, Reynolds, Hood, Praed. 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_6
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