| Victorian Poetry | LaPorte | MW 11:30-1:20 |
This course explores the vexed position of poetry in Victorian literary culture, which in turn may help us to understand the paradoxes inherent to literary hierarchies. The Victorian cult of literature contributed a great deal to the shape of English studies today, of course, and poetry stood at the center of that cult. But this pride of place was mostly reserved for older poetry: recall George Eliot's praise for Dorothea Brooke as having '"the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets." By contrast, contemporary poetry, especially by younger poets, retained a paradoxical status in Victorian culture. It was ambitious and experimental, and moreover enjoyed a readership that would today seem enviable, competing commercially with the novel and other "popular" forms. And yet it could never attain the Biblical or Shakespearean status that contemporary reviewers expected of it. For this reason, poetry's lofty position in the hierarchy of literature invariably served as a burden as well as a prop. We will study the deliberate post-Romantic poetics of the 1830s-1850s, the working-class Spasmodic school, the emergence of nonsense poetry, pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, and the poetry of Empire. The course will assume no prior expertise in poetry or Victorian literature.
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