General materials.

Pionke, Albert D.

Five books are featured here in the general materials section: one introduction to the period and its poetry, one reader of previously published criticism, two monographs, and one massive handbook. From undergraduates relatively unfamiliar with Victorian poetry to specialized researchers with detailed knowledge of Irish doggerel, readers from many walks of academic life should find subjects of productive interest in this year's volumes. Despite their heterogeneity, these books all devote sustained attention to work by Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, suggesting that these two poets, at least, retain their ability to speak to a broad spectrum of interlocutors.

Like earlier volumes in Bloomsbury's Texts and Contexts series, Rosie Miles's Victorian Poetry in Context: Texts and Contexts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), is addressed primarily to undergraduates, although first-time teachers will also find contextual information, textual suggestions, and writing prompts sure to enrich their classrooms. Indeed, the book's ten chapters, organized into three parts, could serve as the framework for a responsible survey course on Victorian poetry. The book begins with "Contexts," which over the course of two chapters offers a breathless overview of some of the period's social, cultural, political, and literary concerns, each punctuated by briefly allusive clusters of topically relevant Victorian poems. Part two, "Texts," composed of six chapters, builds on this literary-historical infrastructure to offer somewhat more detailed readings of a much smaller number of mostly canonical poems: Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850); Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" (1836), "My Last Duchess" (1842), "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855), and "Andrea del Sarto" (1855); Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856); Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862); Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" (1870); Augusta Webster's "A Castaway" (1870); and representative fin-de-siecle poems from Amy Levy and Arthur Symons. Finally, in part three, "Wider Contexts," two chapters survey some of the major developments in Victorian poetry criticism written since the 1950s and begin to explore "the very diverse ways in which Victorian poets and poems have lived on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (149). Miles does her best work in this last section: chapter nine's bibliographical essay, although relatively silent about postcolonial approaches, thoughtfully identifies, categorizes, and evaluates a significant portion of the writing on and anthologizing of Victorian poetry, from Robert Langbaum's Poetry of Experience (1957) forward; chapter ten, "Afterlives and Adaptations," begins with a cogent explanation of the complex poetics of Hopkins, progresses through Thomas Hardy's poetic modernism, pauses briefly to consider High Modernist reactions against their poetic predecessors, and finally romps through numerous echoes and afterimages of Victorian poetry in subsequent poetry, fiction, popular music, pornography, graphic novels, fantasy role-playing games, television, and film. Last but not least, the concluding enumerative bibliography of anthologies, secondary criticism, and web resources should be of enormous benefit to graduate students in the process of constructing reading lists for field exams.

A number of the secondary sources listed by Miles are reproduced in whole or in part in Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), edited by Valentine Cunningham. "The business of this collection," Cunningham writes in his Introduction, "is to show some of the new Theorized, and post-Theory, ways of reading Victorian poetry in action, the engagement with the now stretched canon, the application of renovating ideological and textual insistences to canonistas old and new" (6). In pursuit of this end, the volume's 442 pages reprint 21 previously published essays, some of which have already been reproduced before and at least one of which is included in a Routledge Revivals eBook released this year. Thirteen of the essays originally appeared in the 1990s and thus provide a memorial of sorts to the culture wars; the remainder includes one essay from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, and four from the 2000s. The "Theorized" is thus more in evidence than is "post-Theory," even as subsequent stretching of the canon has made all hut two of the included essays, Susan Zlotnick's "A Thousand Times I'd be a Factory Girl" and Chris White's "Poets and lovers evermore," feel within easy reach of most readers' range of textual motion. Dedicated subscribers to Victorian Poetry will be heartened to learn that the journal originally published over one-third of the included materials and noted the publication of nearly all of the rest in its annual reviews of the year's work.

This year's review also includes a new book from W. David Shaw, The Ghost Behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2014). Its twelve relatively short and much-subdivided chapters "do not offer a single argument about Shakespeare and the Victorians" but instead construct "a Shakespearean grid of thought and feeling" on which to plot associations, analogies, and synchronic connections (1, 3). Shaw's Shakespearean references range across twenty-nine plays and selected poems--despite noting Robert Browning's powerful reactions to performances of Richard 111 by Edward Kean and of King Lear by Tommaso Salvini, the Shakespeare in question is overwhelmingly textual rather than theatrical--with Hamlet and Lear especially prominent. Similarly, although the Victorian poets of the subtitle capaciously include Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, and Charles Dickens, whose Great Expectations receives its own chapter, as well as a broad swath of verse writers, Tennyson and Robert Browning receive the majority of attention. Shaw's erudition and close reading skills are especially on display in chapter eight, "The End of Illusion," which moves effortlessly from "Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, one of the few books we know Shakespeare read" to the Book of Job to Lear in order to unpack that "powerful rendering of higher ignorance in literature," Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1855) (123, 124). Appropriately, The Ghost Behind the Masks ultimately characterizes the relationship between Shakespeare and the Victorians in terms derived from Mill's "What Is Poetry?" (1833): "Overheard as a poet rather than heard as an orator, [Shakespeare] is a prophet on whom Victorians may eavesdrop. If they trap his wisdom at all, it is usually in a parenthesis or aside, as an insight captured en passant" (230).

"For all that literary history usually posits that Yeats, writing a century after Wordsworth, is at the beginning of a revival of original Irish poetry written in the English language," Matthew Campbell's Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801-1924 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013) recovers "at least a century of prosodic innovation in Irish-English poetry" prior to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1924 (7, 24). Equally resistant to the "better-known British story ... of victory over the French followed by reform, science, empire and the novel" and to the "over-influence [of] hindsight cast back from subsequent Irish history, of cultural revival, insurrection and (partial) political and cultural independence," Campbell meticulously traces the ways in which "the linguistic shape and poetic forms of revival were at first tempered in the synthetic, bogus and the hybrid" (15, 6, 14). As explained in chapter one, the book's methodological approach is, itself, a productive synthesis of postcolonial theory--represented most prominently by the work of Homi Bhabha and Jahan Ramazani, and, closer to the Irish scene, Richard Kirkland and David Lloyd, all of whom stress the significance of heteroglossia and hybridity--contextual reconstruction, scrupulous close reading, and a welcome embrace of the exuberant fun sometimes encoded within what Campbell succinctly labels "the Irish-English synthetic lyric" (40). By Campbell's account in chapter two, this lyric first takes shape in the hands of "latter-day Whig and erstwhile United Irishman manque" Thomas Moore, whose eight-volume Irish Melodies (1808-21) combined English-language lyrics with Irish music (48). Anxious to secure copyright in the United States, Moore republished his lyrics without the accompanying music under the neutered title Melodies (1821), thereby inadvertently producing "an effect in print unforeseen by writing for musical performance" (34). Francis Sylvester Mahony's satiric response to Moore through his alter ego Father Andrew Prout in Fraser's Magazine in the early 1830s serves as the subject of Campbell's third chapter, which concludes with a fascinating reconstruction of the genealogy of Mahony's parodic doggerel "The Shandon Bells." In chapter four, a more sympathetic response to Moore emerges from the "maudlin jumble" of Samuel Ferguson, essayist and translator of Gaelic poetry for Dublin University Magazine, and author of Lays of Western Gael (1865). Campbell's fifth chapter presents the "utter stylistic originality" of James Clarence Mangan through his adaptations--to the turbulent and ultimately Famine-ravaged Ireland of the 1840s--of collections of Persian, Ottoman, and Coptic poetry that had themselves first been translated into German (104). Chapter six reclaims English laureate Tennyson as an occasional writer of Irish poetry, grounding its claims in readings of "Bugle Song" (1850) and "The Voyage of Maeldune" (1880) that unearth the multiple Irish antecedents for Tennyson's "poetic Celticism" (156). Although he shares some of the spotlight with a young William Butler Yeats, Hopkins occupies the majority of Campbell's attention in chapter seven, which places a number of Hopkins's mature experiments in sprung rhythm against the backdrop of the Home Rule Crisis of the 1880s. Appropriately, twentieth-century poetry by the mature Yeats concludes Irish Poetry Under the Union, whose eighth and final chapter recounts Yeats's revisions of his own early poems, with their multitude of Irish-English influences, in 1924.

By far the largest and most wide-ranging of general materials to appear in this year's review is The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), edited by Matthew Bevis. With 887 pages of main text distributed across 51 chapters, this substantial volume features essays by some of the most recognized names in Victorian poetry criticism, arranged so as to give pride of place to the resurgence of formalist methods of reading that has shaped recent literary study. Bevis sets the tone for this commitment to matters of form in his "Introduction: At Work with Victorian Poetry" when he frames Victorian poets' repeated efforts "to clarify how the work of the imagination might best be valued and measured in relation to the demands of the age" as "a discernible set of preoccupations about style" (4, 2). "Work" is thus a supple point of entry into "matters of social decorum as well as the finer points of style," allowing Bevis to recapture through its performance what Arthur Henry Hallam had approvingly characterized in "On Some Characteristics of Modern Poetry" (1831) as the "requisite exertion" demanded from readers by Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) (7). In a final statement of heuristic principle, Bevis explains that "whilst the volume builds on recent theoretical, cultural, and historical scholarship, it remains committed to a sustained focus on the craft of the poems themselves" (12).

The remaining 50 chapters of the book are subdivided into four unequally sized parts, the first of which devotes seven chapters to the subject of "Form." Michael D. Hurley approaches the "multiformity" of Victorian verse in his chapter on "Rhythm" by "generalizing about a poetics of fleshliness" grounded in the somatic experience of reading aloud (21). He identifies two underlying "modes of writing ... jostling in Victorian poetics: the Anglo-Saxon and alliterative verse revival" represented by Hopkins and "the urbane sophistications of Classical verse" invoked by Algernon Charles Swinburne (26). Derek Attridge's "Beat" traces Victorian poets' various experiments with isochrony, including their adaptations of the Russian verse form of the dol'nik, Anglicized as

dolnik and used by poets as diverse as William Blake, the Brownings, Mangan, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, and others. Turning from prosody to the anxieties of "Address," Robert Douglas Fairhurst considers how, of "the many reasons for Victorian poetry's self-doubts, several were generated specifically by the problem of literary address" (58). In "Rhyme," Michael Campbell reprises the same appreciation for fun that informs his argument in Irish Poetry Under the Union when he uses nonsense verse from Tennyson and Edward Lear to frame his discussion of some of the ways in which "issues of naturalness of speech and comic incongruity which lie behind many considerations of rhyme were pressing for the sense of craft practiced by the Victorian poets" (75). Garrett Stewart positions Victorian practitioners of the dramatic monologue, especially, as the natural heirs of Wordsworth's turn, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), away from hackneyed poetic "Diction." Isobel Armstrong writes about "Syntax" as both articulate and articulated linguistic energy through close readings of the "idiolects" perceptible in Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears" (1847), Robert Browning's "Two in the Campagna" (1855), Christina Rossetti's "Winter Rain" (1862), and Michael Field's "Ebbtide at Sundown" (1908). Finally, Herbert Tucker concludes "Form" with a wide-ranging chapter on "Story" that includes among its claims the proposition that "the monologue emerges in hindsight as Victorian Britain's answer to the concurrent development of the short story in America and on the Continent" (139).

Part II, "Literary Landscapes," contains nine chapters, advancing chronologically from literary-historical influences upon through subsequent periods and writers influenced by Victorian poetry. As in "Form," the chapter titles in this second part of the Handbook indicate clearly where readers with specific interests should begin: Isobel Hurst, "Victorian Poetry and the Classics"; Matthew Townend, "Victorian Medievalisms"; Erik Gray, "Victorian Miltons"; Bharat Tandon, "Victorian Shakespeares"; Michael O'Neill, "The Romantic Bequest: Arnold and Others"; Elisa New, "American Intersections: Poetry in the United States 1837-1901"; Peter Robinson,

"The Poetry of Modern Life: On the Pavement"; Adam Piette, "Modernist Victorianism"; and David Wheatley, "'Dispatched Dark Regions Far Afield and Farther': Contemporary Poetry and Victorianism." This clarity is especially welcome now that many college and university libraries purchase such texts exclusively through a subscription to the database Oxford Handbooks Online, which, while eminently searchable, is less felicitous for browsing. Gray's chapter on Milton's paradoxical absent presence in Victorian poetry particularly rewards those with the luxury to linger. Organizing his chapter around three models of engagement with a "Singular," a "Diffuse," and an "Invisible" Milton, Gray compellingly argues that "if Milton seems less insistently present to the Victorian than to the Romantic imagination, it is not because he was unfamiliar to the Victorians, but overfamiliar" (185). Poems by Tennyson and Barrett Browning serve as primary examples of how, for the Victorians, Milton could be reinterpreted as "a poet of understatement, who exerts his influence subtly, inconspicuously, but powerfully from the background" (197). Victorian poetry itself operates powerfully from the background according to Piette's chapter, which is cleverly arranged around the acrostic "Victor," short for a purposefully regendered "Victorian" and indicative of Piette's claim that "the Victorian strain persists as a ghostly voice of the thing most despised, as a father and mother memory for the twentieth-century orphan-artist" (274).

Part III, "Readings," occupies the majority of pages in the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry. Each of its 23 chapters focuses on a particular poem or volume of poetry from one Victorian poet. As in most literature anthologies, the poets are discussed in chronological order of birth, from Barrett Browning through Charlotte Mew. The list of authors and titles is too long to include here, and their collective embarrassment of riches renders highly idiosyncratic any discussion of individual cases. Nevertheless, chapters 30 and 31 offer a particularly pleasing juxtaposition of subjects in James Thomson and Augusta Webster. In "City of Pain: The Poetry of James Thomson," Mark Ford seeks to revive the "flickering rather than constant" interest in the "division between the maudit and the bourgeois" evident throughout Thomson's work, most especially in "The City of Dreadful Night" (1874) (494). Displaying the payoffs of the focus on "craft" announced in Bevis's "Introduction," Ford observes, "If the poem's city is a place of radical homelessness, its style yet communicates an inability to jettison the poetic conventions Thomson inherited, leaving it effectively stranded between two worlds ... with nowhere to rest its head" (501). If Thomson's star has been flickering of late, Webster's has grown ever brighter since her rediscovery in the 1990s; however, as Emily Harrington notes in "Augusta Webster: Time and the Lyric Ideal," critical interest has focused overwhelmingly on her dramatic, at the expense of her lyric and narrative, poetry. Harrington, in a welcome departure from this trend, devotes her chapter to a reading of Webster's Yu-Pe-Ya's Lute (1874), an English poetic adaptation of a French translation of an original Chinese tale. Paying particular attention to the "lyric-narrative hybridity" of this unusual poem, she reveals how form reinforces Webster's implied critique of "the social implications of aesthetic ideals," as when her use of open heroic couplets "reflects Yu-Pe-Ya's temporal and spatial conflict: he wants to pause and stay, yet feels compelled to continue forward" (518, 515, 511).

Part IV acknowledges the continued explanatory potential of more historically and culturally invested strategies of reading. Under the broad rubric of "The Place of Poetry," the volume's final eleven essays reconnect Victorian poetry to a range of contextual and thematic concerns that are, once again, suggested by their respective titles: Samantha Matthews, "Marketplaces"; Stephanie Kudek Weiner, "Inner Space: Bodies and Minds"; Anna Henchman, "Outer Space: Physical Science"; Rolf P. Lessenich, "City and Street"; Catherine Maxwell, "In the Artist's Studio"; Francis O'Gorman, "On Not Hearing: Victorian Poetry and Music"; Kirstie Blair, "Church Going"; Justin Quinn, "Irish Poetry in the Victorian Age"; Joseph Phelan, "Empire and Orientalisms"; James Williams, "The Jokes in the Machine: Comic Verse"; and Daniel Karlin, "'The song-bird whose name is Legion': Bad Verse and its Critics." Matthews's meticulous reconstruction of the generally poor economics of publishing single-authored selections and collected editions of poetry in a period dominated by a prose-hungry mass audience will be particularly welcome in the classroom. The various strategies of achieving prominence or profitability or both despite the larger market--for Tennyson the laureateship, for Edward Fitzgerald Pre-Raphaelite endorsement, for Arthur Hugh Clough periodical publication in prestigious venues like Atlantic Monthly or Comhill Magazine, and for multiple authors reprinting in late-century literary anthologies--could all serve as instructive starting points for discussion of Victorian poetry as a material object. Equally useful for the classroom is Phelan's essay, which he frames with pithy discussions of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" (1842) and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" (1886), in between touching on Louisa Stuart Costello's The Rose Garden of Persia (1845), Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (1853), Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), Robert Browning's "Muleykeh" (1880), Toru Dutt's posthumous Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882), and other poems. Phelan's productive troubling of the relationship between Romantic Orientalism and Victorian Empire offers students a nuanced way of thinking about the appearance of and attitude toward the East in Victorian poetry that acknowledges both the influence of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and more recent postcolonial work on hybridity.