Abstract
‘I want to write a poem of a new class,’ wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as early as 1844, of the work that would eventually become Aurora Leigh. Its novelty would consist in its engagement with the daily life of the times — in Barrett Browning’s determination, as she puts it, to ‘go on, & touch this real everyday life of our age, & hold it with my two hands’.1 Though acknowledging a precedent of sorts in Byron’s Don Juan, Barrett Browning casts herself in the role of pioneer, breaking new ground in her attempt to poeticize this first truly modern, and distinctly novelistic, age. Part modern epic, part verse-novel, Aurora Leigh was published in 1856 to enormous and instantaneous popularity.
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Notes
Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, reprinted in Margaret Reynolds (ed.) (1996) Aurora Leigh (New York: Norton), p. 329 (30 December 1844).
See the biographical sketch of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton in Philip Kelley, Ronald Hudson and Scott Lewis (eds) (1984–) The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18 vols (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press), XIX, pp. 349–63.
Owen Meredith [Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton] (1860) Dedication to Lucile (London: Chapman & Hall). Further references are to this edition and are hereafter given in the text.
William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864, 1869) (1999) (Poole: Woodstock Books), Preface (1864), p. vii; Preface (1869), pp. iv–v.
[Aubrey de Vere] (1858) ‘The Angel in the House’, Edinburgh Review, CII, 121–33 (pp. 121–3).
R. H. Super (ed.) (1960–77) The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), I: On the Classical Tradition, p. 12.
William Wordsworth (1979) The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton), I.158, 166, 168, 222 (quotations from 1850 version).
Coventry Patmore [ 1906 ] The Angel in the House together with The Victories of Love, intro. by Alice Meynell (London: Routledge). Further references are to this edition and are hereafter given in the text.
Christopher Ricks (ed.) (1987) The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman). All further references to Tennyson’s poetry are to this edition and are hereafter given in the text.
[Walter Bagehot] (1859) ‘Tennyson’s Idylls’, National Review, I X, 368–94 (pp. 375–6).
Alexander Smith (1909) ‘A Life-Drama’, in William Sinclair (ed.) The Poetical Works of Alexander Smith (Edinburgh: W. P. Nimmo, Hay, & Mitchell), Scene VI, p. 71. Further references are to this edition and are hereafter given in the text.
Isobel Armstrong (ed.) (1972) Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry, 1830– 1870 (London: Athlone Press), p. 6.
Dorothy Mermin (1983) The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), p. 4.
Howard Foster Lowry (ed.) (1932) The Letters of Matthew Arnold to A. H. Clough (London: Oxford University Press), p. 99 (February 1849).
Letter to Edward Hawkins, Frederick L. Mulhauser (ed.) (1957) The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I, p. 249 (3 March [1849]).
Humphry House (1948) ‘Pre-Raphaelite Poetry’, BBC Third Programme (1948), in James Sambrook (ed.) (1974) Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 126–32 (pp. 128–9).
Herbert Francis Brett Brett-Smith and Clifford Ernest Jones (eds) (1924–34) The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 10 vols (London: Constable & Co), VIII, p. 12.
Thomas Blackwell (1972) Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (Menston: Scolar Press), pp. 26, 28.
Miles Taylor (ed.) (2001) The English Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 41.
A. C. Bradley (1909; reprinted 1959) ‘The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth’, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan), p. 191.
John A. Heraud (1839) ‘The Chartist Epic’, The Monthly Magazine, II, 1–38 (pp. 35, 36). Of course, Carlyle’s own response to the age, above all in the fierce and epoch-making Past and Present (1843), was deeply ambivalent and even paradoxical.
‘Recent English Poetry’, North American Review, LXXVII, 1–30. Reprinted as ‘Recent English Poetry: A Review of Several Volumes of Poems by Alexander Smith, Matthew Arnold, and Others’ in Buckner B. Trawick (ed.) (1964) Selected Prose Works of Arthur Hugh Clough, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press), p. 144.
See J. P. Phelan (ed.) (1995) Clough: Selected Poems (London: Longman) for a fuller account of the manuscript and publishing history of the poem, as well as textual variants between the 1849 version, the version that appeared in 1858 in the new periodical The Atlantic Monthly and the corrections Clough made to the poem in 1859.
Virginia Woolf (1932) ‘Aurora Leigh’, The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace), reprinted in Reynolds, pp. 439–46 (p. 444).
W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds) (1974) Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1850), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), I, pp. 139, 143.
These examples can all be found in George Watson (ed.) (1969) The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 3:1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Those mentioned range from the utterly obscure to names at least vaguely familiar to scholars of the period: Thomas Campbell, Theodric: A Domestic Tale (1825)
Charles Jeremiah Wells, Joseph and his brethren: a scriptural drama (1824)
Charles Dibdin, Young Arthur, or the child of mystery: a metrical romance (1819)
Richard Mant, The simpliciad: a satirico-didactic poem (1808)
William Glen, The lonely isle: a south-sea island tale (1816)
John Galt, The battle of Largs: a Gothic poem with several miscellaneous pieces (1804)
William Motherwell, Renfrewshire characters and scenery: a poem in three hundred and sixty-five cantos, by Isaac Brown (1824)
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The improvisatore, in three fyttes, with other poems (1821)
Thomas Tod Stoddart, The death-wake or lunacy: a necromaunt in three chimeras (1831)
Ernest Hones, The lass and the lady, or love’s ladder: a tale of thrilling interest (1855). See also Stuart Curran’s ‘Prolegomenon: A Primer on Subtitles in British Romantic Poetry’ to his Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
See Richard Altick (1991) The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), pp. 36–7.
Anna Seward (1784) Louisa: A Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles (London: J. Jackson & G. Robinson), First Epistle, p. 5.
Rod Edmond (1988) Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (London: Routledge), p. 35.
See, for example, James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns (1975)
Daniel Albright, Tennyson: The Muses’ Tug-of-War (1986)
Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (1988).
John Jump (ed.) (1967) Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), p. 6.
Hallam Tennyson (1897) Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan), p. 396.
Emile Montégut (1857) ‘Un poème de la vie moderne en Angleterre’ (‘A poem of modern life in England’), Revue des deux mondes, II, 322–53 (p. 334): ‘Çà et là il est fait mention de certains détails de notre vie moderne: il y a bien une banqueroute, mais c’est le souvenir d’une banqueroute; il y a une fête, mais nous n’y assistons pas, et nous n’en voyons que les reflets; la guerre de Crimée nous renvoie le retentissement lointain de ses canonnades: sons et échos perdus dans l’air, voilà tout ce que le poète a mis dans son œuvre de la vie moderne’ (translation mine).
Tennyson and Musset’, in Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (eds) (1925–7) The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 20 vols (London: William Heinemann), XIV, p. 329.
Herbert F. Tucker (1992) ‘Trials of Fiction: Novel and Epic in the Geraint and Enid Episodes from “Idylls of the King”’, Victorian Poetry, X XX, 441–61 (p. 445).
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© 2015 Natasha Moore
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Moore, N. (2015). Introduction: A Poem of the Age. In: Victorian Poetry and Modern Life. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137537805_1
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