Armstrong 1993

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Introduction

• This is also anthologized in Vic Lit: Criticism and Debates, 2016.
• 1 The Victorian period has always been regarded as isolated between two periods, Romanticism and modernism. Thus Vic poetry is seen in terms of transition.
• Modernism, in spite of its desire to see itself in terms of a break with history, actually endorses that continuity, for a radical break must break with something.
• The eroticisms and the euphemisms of bourgeois capitalism and its ideology, its inordinate excesses and concealments, are embodied in the voluptuous taxidermy of the stuffed sofa.
• 2-3 We have learned to understand that to constitute something as a gap is a strategy for concealing anxiety. What kind of anxieties could the Victorians have created for the twentieth century and why are they still culturally significant? To clarify these anxieties it is necessary to see what the Victorians themselves were worried about [i.e., the conditions of modernity].
• 3 Victorian modernism sees itself as new but it does not, like C20 modernism, conceive itself in terms of a radical break with the past. Victorian modernism, as it emerges in its poetics, describes itself as belonging to a condition of crisis which had emerged directly from economic and cultural change.... To be modern was to be overwhelmingly secondary.
• A belated poet was post-revolutionary, existing with the constant possibility of mass political upheaval and fundamental change in the structure of society, which meant that the nature of society had to be redefined. Belatedness was post-industrial and post-technological, existing with and theorising the changed relationships and new forms of alienated labour which capitalism was consolidating, and conscious of the predatory search for new areas of exploitation which was creating a new colonial 'outside' to British society. It was post-teleological and scientific, conceiving beliefs, including those of Xianity, anthropologically in terms of belief systems and representations through myth. Simply because of its awareness of teleological insecurity, Victorian poetry is arguably the last theological poetry to be written.
• 4 ...the Victorian poets were the first group of writers to feel that what they were doing was simply unnecessary and redundant.
• In his essay, 'Signs of the times' (1829), Carlyle perceived that the new distribution of wealth generated in an industrial nation had transformed the structure of society and was 'strangely altering the old relations'. The relationship of labour to the products of labour, in a situation in which 'nothing is now done directly...old modes of exertion are discredited and thrown aside', radically changed the conceptualisation of work. Mechanization, compounding the effect of the division of labour, depersonalized the labourer and arbitrarily removed the products of labour from him, thus opening up a gap between work and its results. Self-creation through work was no longer possible because the connection between work and the world which labour supposedly transforms had been severed. The labourer had no control over his products and the visible cause-and-effect relationship in work and its results had been eliminated. Carlyle attributed this to mechanization, Marx to the nature of capital, but they both describe alienated labor.
• 5 In Sartor Carlyle connects the representational signs of mechanised printing with the nature of money. 'Movable types', he writes punningly, can demobilise armies and create revolutions of democratic reform. He means, of course, that rapid mechanical reproduction and dissemination of language can influence as never before in history because the printed word can belong to everyone. But he also means that 'type' is moveable because printing removes language and places it and its effects beyond the control of the writer. It is subject to arbitrary interpretation and because of this the fixed and universal 'Type', ultimately a theological notion, embodying permanent values, can no longer sustain itself and is the subject of arbitrary signification. Money works in the same way and the currency of money and print are connected. A piece of leather, marked with a sign and exchanged for goods, becomes a representation or substitute which, separated from the things it represents, can take on varying meaning in circulation and become the subject of arbitrary regulation. Carlyle was as aware as Marx of the capriciousness of money as a metaphorical system. Money and moveable types work together as forms of arbitrary power.
  • connection of Victorian modernity to printing technology in Carlyle -- though this isn't a new problem; what about the mediation of scribes with manuscripts?
• 6 There is a multiple fracture, as it were, for life itself, working in contrary motion to the alienation of art, is established as a condition of estrangement. Relations are indirect and mystified where 'nothing is now done directly', where the self separated from nature cannot be created through an economy of harmonious work on the world. Victorian poetry is obsessed with a series of displacements effected by these redefined relations, and [7] helps to bring these redefinitions about. The problems of agency and consciousness, labour, language, and representation become central. Teleology is displaced by epistemology and politics because relationships and their representation become the contested area, between self and society, self and labour, self and nature, self and language and above all between self and the loved.
• The effort to renegotiate a content to every relationship between self and the world is the Victorian poet's subject. It is a simultaneously personal and cultural project and carries the poet into new genres and a new exploration of language. It entails renegotiation the terms of self and world themselves.
  • based on the crises of modernity
• 7 Where the Victorians strive to give a content to these problems, political sexual, epistemological ,and to formulate a cultural critique, the moderns celebrate the elimination of content. Victorian problems become abstracted, formalized and aestheticized. The difference is ideological, as the stuffing of the Victorian sofa disappears and art becomes self-reflexive and self-referential.... The modernist repression of the Victorians comes surely from an understanding that the Victorians had anticipated the self-reflexive condition and rejected it.
• 8 The history of Victorian poetry is the gradual assent to self-reflexive art and the struggle against such an assent.
• 10 The difficulty about this is that everything that is observed is all there in the text anyway, and it is a strangely arbitrary decision which makes some elements of the text manifest and some latent, some conscious and some unconscious, since all elements of the text are actually manifest. A process of selection has gone on, in which the critic has decided to select an intentional and an unintentional project. To simplify a text's projects and then to invoke the complexities of the text itself to undermine the simple project is an odd procedure. A text is not quite like a patient in analysis and actually anticipates these strategies of deconstruction by enabling them to take place.
  • critique of symptomatic reading
• A text is endless struggle and contention, struggle with a changing project, struggle with the play of ambiguity and contradiction. This way of reading which gives equal weight to a text's stated project and the polysemic and possibly wayward meanings it generates.
• 11 Perhaps what was lacking in these studies (and which may account for the subsequent lack of creative followers) was an account of the language of Vic poetry in relation to both formal and cultural problems, an attempt to see these things as inseparable from each other. The link between cultural complexities and the complexities of language is indirect but can be perceived. We might start with the nature of language in Vic poetry .For to read a Vic poem is to be made acutely aware of the fact that it is made of language. Whether it is the strange, arcane artifice of Tennyson's early poems or the splutter of speech in Browning...the sheer verbalness of poetry is foregrounded. It is as if the poet's secondariness takes a stand [12] on the self-conscious assertion oft he unique discourse of poetry. This is connected with the overdetermination of ambiguity. The open nerve of exposed feeling in Tennyson is registered in a language fraught with ambiguity. Christina Rossetti's distilled exactitude analyses into an equally precise ambiguity.... In an age of 'movable type' and mechanical reproduction in which signification moves beyond the immediate control of the writer it is as if the writer can only resort to an openness in advance of the reader, testing out the possibilities of systematic misprision [the deliberate concealment of one's knowledge]. Such language draws attention to the nature of words as a medium of representation. In the same way poets resort to songs and speech, as if to foreground the act of reading a secondary text, for the song is not sung but read, and the speech is not spoken but written.
• DOUBLE POEM
• 12 The doubleness of language is not local but structural.
• ...In a feat of recomposition and externalization the poem turns its expressive utterance around so that it becomes the opposite of itself, not only the subject's utterance but the object of analysis and critique.
• 13 The poignant expression of exclusion to which Mariana's state gives rise, and which is reiterated in the marking of barriers - the moat itself, the gate with clinking latch, and curtained casement, the hinged doors - is simultaneously an analysis of the hypersensitive hysteria induced by the coercion of sexual taboo. These are hymenal taboos, which Mariana is induced, by a cultural consensus that is hidden from her, to experience as her own condition. Hidden from her, but not from the poem, the barriers are man-made, cunningly constructed through the material fabric of the house she inhabits, the enclosed space in which she is confined. It is the narrative voice which describes these spaces, not Mariana as speaker.
  • exclusion is itself and analyzing the condition that the coerciveness of lack of sexual openness causes(?)
• By seeing utterance as both subject and as object, it was possible for the poet to explore expressive psychological forms simultaneously as psychological conditions and as constructs, the phenomenology of a culture, projections which indicate the structure of relationships. I have called this objectification of consciousness a phenomenological form because phenomenology seeks to describe and analyze the manifestations of consciousness rather than ints internal condition. Thus such a reading relates consciousness to the external forms of the culture in which it exists. The gap between subjective and objective readings often initiates a debate between a subject-centered or expressive and a phenomenological or analytical reading, but above all it draws attention to the act of representation, the act of relationship and the mediations of language, different in a psychological and in a phenomenological world.
• 15 To see the text as struggle continually investing terms with a new content is to see it as a responsive rather than a symptomatic discourse. Both the Marxist and feminist readings to which I have referred consider the Vic poem in different ways as a symptom of the political unconscious and thus irrevocably blind to its own meaning. No text can account for the way it is read in future cultures but it can establish the grounds of the struggle for meaning. There is a difference between what is blindfold and what is unpredictable. What I would call a new Hegelian [i.e., dialectical?] reading avoids symptomatic interpretations, just as it avoids the endless ludic contradictions which sometimes emerge from deconstruction. A text which struggles with the logic of its own contradictions is in any case arguably nearer, though not identical with, Derridean principles, in which a text is threatened by collapse from internal oppositions, than to the systematic incoherence which deconstruction sometimes elicits.
• 16 The lobule poem, with its systematically ambiguous language, out of which expressive and phenomenological readings emerge, is a structure commensurate with the 'moveable type' which Carlyle saw as both the repercussion and the cause of shifts in C19 culture.
• Moveable type, where technology mobilizes the logos, makes the process of signification a political matter as it opens up a struggle for the meaning of words which is part of the relations of power explored through the structures of the poem. Hence the poet's systematic exploration of ambiguity. ...The poem of the post-industrial world recognizes the displacement of relationships in its structure as well as in its language.
• 17 Vic poems are skeptical and affirmative simultaneously for they compel a strenuous reading and assume an active reader who will participate in the struggle of the lyric voice, a reader with choices to make, choices which are created by the terms of the poem itself. The active reader is compelled to be internal to the poem's contradictions and recomposes the poem's processes in the act of comprehending them as ideological struggle. There is no end to struggle because there is no end to the creative constructs and the renewal of content which its energy brings forth.
• 21 This post-Hegelian reading recognizes the antagonistic struggle of dialectic rather than its resolutions or free play.

LaPorte 2016

Glosses Armstrong Intro. LaPorte, Charles. "Victorian Poetry and Form." Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates. Ed. Lee Behlman and Anne Longmuir. London: Routledge, 2016. Print.

• 37 New Formalism: blending genre study and questions of aesthetics with a rigorous historicization of social and material contexts.
• Armstrong constructs a crucial frame for its emergence in Victorian studies.
• A explores the crisis of modernity in poetry that much of the C20 has dismissed as unadventurous, stilted, sentimental, and twee. She asks that we look again at the post-Romantic self-consciousness of this art form and its struggle with what she calls the modern "conditions of being post-revolutionary, post-industrial, post-telelogical and post-Kantian."
• 38: Far from exhorting one another to make things "new" a la Ezra Pound, Victorian poets found themselves preoccupied by the too-obvious newness of their "problems of representation, fiction, and language."... It is their fraught self awareness and their creative responses to it, she avers, that combine to make Vic poetry "the most sophisticated poetic form, and the most politically complex, to arise in the past two hundred years."

Arnold

"The Liberal in Crisis: Arnold"

• 205 [Arnold's] attempt to recentre poetry in a moral tradition in the new circumstances of the mid-century.
• Both [Arnold and Clough] found ways of turning the exploration of subjectivity into the material of critique and investigation, either through drama or through the 'sentimental' poet's mediation of naive material.
  • unclear on the sentimental poet bit...
• builds initial reading on "The Forsaken Merman"
• 206 Arnold's work never wishes to commit itself to this 'strange disease' of modern life (as the famous phrase of 'The Scholar-Gipsy' has it), but is continually aware of the results of its over-reflective, alienated conditions.
• 207 Arnold becomes the truly modern poet he never really wished to be when he encounters these historical forces [isolation, psychological stress, territorial invasion from the east] in Empedocles on Etna and Sohrab and Rustum. The ethical, stabilizing poetry of joy he wished to create reverses itself, and he becomes the European poet whose cultural boundaries are threatened by dissolution.
• 208 His [Arnold's] refusal to differentiate between them [Keats, Browning, Tennyson] comes from his belief that both the poetry of sensation and the reflective poetry of political analysis spring from the same roots and can be brought under the same head as part of a destructive cycle of intensity and ennui which is endemic to Romantic art and which belongs to what is essentially a psychological poetry, whatever the superficial difference of form. Arnold has done his work so well that his subsuming of all Romantic poetry into a psychology of expressive feeling remains as a powerful account of such poetry.
• 209 In fact he abandoned a theory of representation and language and adopted instead a theory of style. And style was the produce 'grand moral effects' by its limpidity, its capacity to be an ethical state rather than to represent one.
• Something of this [stoicism] comes out, not in the declared elegy of Clough, 'Thyrsis', but in 'Dover Beach', surely as much a love poem to him as the occasion of Arnold's marriage, which accomplished an effective separation.
• ...This commentary [in 'Dover Beach'] is mingled almost inseparably with Arnold's sceptical and ambivalent response to the French revolution of 1848.
• 210 The function of the grand style is to 'compose and elevate the mind' ('compose' here suggests a therapeutic calm) by producing moral effects, not statements, by expressing 'character', not 'mind', by satisfying 'religious wants', not by expressing religious wants.
• 214 It is a measure of Arnold's need to erase the very notion of political and social conflict that it figures almost mockingly as a repressed element in his own Empedocles.
  • contrasting with Thomas Cooper's "The Purgatory of Suicides" (1845)
• 219 His defence, a moralised aestheticism, the beautiful as ethical, is canny in the sense that it prevented poetry from being a commodity while introducing the moral as a form of 'use'. The fallacies of the Preface, its depoliticized stance and the repression of Clough's work its values virtually ensured, should not prevent one from seeing it as the brilliant manoeuvre of a principled liberal in a tight spot. His poetry is compelling because it recognizes the strain and difficulty of his enterprise and the confusion of the voices he encountered.
• 225 ...consciously literary poetry of pastoral and rural retreat can serve a number of purposes. It can be, and generally is, a retreat, but pastoral always presupposes the existing world, against which [226] its conventions are measured...and thus it has the function of critique simultaneously with its idealizations.
• 231 Because they were detached from the immediate physical demands of war [the Crimean War], Clough and Arnold were necessarily more aloof from it at the level of conscious discussion than working-class contemporaries for whom it meant literally life and death. Their doubts about manhood, battle and territory, though deeply structured by the dissolution of post-1848 Europe and its politics, were expressed as existential doubts, ambiguities and repressions which were constantly sliding into trope: they were real enough, but working-class response to the same things was necessarily more absolute, direct and immediate, and was expressed either as fervent idealisation of war or fervent protest and resistance.