General materials.

Pionke, Albert D.

Seven books are featured here in the general materials section: five monographs, one essay collection, and one anthology. Their subjects range from the Victorians' lively debates over prosody, to the impressive outpouring of English language verse from British India, to the intersection of poetry and pictures in the mid-century illustrated gift book, to broad surveys of the expanded poetic canon for the undergraduate market. Together, they ask us to reconsider the dominance and ideological valence of definitions of meter grounded in syllabic stress, the formation of literary canons on the basis of ethno-nationalism, the material conditions under which poetry was produced and consumed in the Victorian period, and the strategies of reading required to ensure that this poetry will continue to appeal to new generations of students.

Faced with readers "deaf to a significant dimension of the meaning of poetry produced during a period when poets were not simply interested in the technicalities of verse but obsessed by them" (pp. 1-2), and determined to complicate simplistic accounts of the triumph of free verse after Whitman, Joseph Phelan, in The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiments in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Palgrave, 2012), reconstructs the position of "musical prosody" within nineteenth-century debates over English poetry. Chapter one traces the genealogy of this theory of versification from its beginnings in Joshua Steele's Prosodia Rationalis (1779) through William Mitford's Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language (1804), John Thelwall's Illustrations of English Rhythms (1812), William Crowe's Treatise on English Versification (1827), William O'Brien's The Ancient Rhythmical Art Recovered (1843), Coventry Patmore's Prefatory Study of English Metrical Law (1878), the key ideas of which first appeared in "English Metrical Critics," in the August 1857 issue of the North British Review, and Sidney Lanier's The Science of English Verse (1880). Never quite a homogeneous school of thought, these writers nonetheless asserted in common an analogy bordering on identity between music and poetry and, in Phelan's words, shared two idees fixes, "the fundamental principle of isochronous intervals between accents" and "the recognition of the potential for 'harmony' between the meaning of a line of poetry and its metrical structure" (pp. 17-18).

Although "quixotic and ultimately doomed," and exercising an "extremely limited" influence (pp. 41-42), the musical prosodists provide Phelan with a compelling point of entry into two intriguing nineteenth-century poetic experiments: the attempt, confined largely to the 1820s through the 1850s, to adapt the hexameter to English language verse, which forms the subject of chapter two; and the theorization and reemergence of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse by the 1870s and 1880s, the focus of chapter three. Within these two central chapters, Phelan devotes meticulous attention to several poems that no longer enjoy a wide readership, including Robert Southey's The Vision of Judgment, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, William Morris's Love is Enough, and Patmore's The Unknown Eros; chapter three also concludes with a broad discussion of the poetry and poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book's fourth and final chapter chronicles the incremental rise to dominance of free verse and concomitant decline of musical prosody. In Phelan's nuanced account, Whitman's example did not take the poetic world by storm, but instead provided one impetus, albeit a powerful one, for individual "irruptions of proto-free verse" that assumed only gradually and retrospectively "the revolutionary significance later imputed to them" (p. 135). The chapter and the book conclude with T. S. Eliot's 1942 lecture "The Music of Poetry," which completes the "migration of the idea of poetry as music from analogy to metaphor" by eschewing scansion and locating poetry's expressive power in "the rhythmical structures of everyday language" (p. 179).

Jason David Hall's edited collection, Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Ohio Univ. Press, 2011), also devotes itself to the technicalities of verse, and a number of its contributors speak directly to the issue of musical prosody raised by Phelan, while the book as a whole ranges significantly farther afield in its discussion of the theory, practice, and cultural presence of poetics in Britain. Two of the eleven essay in Meter Matters, Susan Wolfson's "Romantic Measures: Stressing the Sound of Sound" and Matthew Bevis's "Byron's Feet," concern themselves exclusively with Romantic subjects, and so fall outside the scope of this review. Another five devote themselves to individual poems or authors from the Victorian period: "'Break, Break, Break' into Song," by Yopie Prins, is a self-described "exercise in historical prosody, analyzing how late Victorian metrical discourse made possible the imagination of the poem 'as if' it might be heard" (p. 108), a conceptual process that she helps her readers to see by reprinting the scores of several musical settings for Tennyson's poem; Jason R. Rudy's "Material Patmore" implicitly agrees with Phelan in identifying Patmore's writing on poetics as "a crucial turning point in Victorian metrical theory" (p. 135), but also positions English Metrical Law as a conservative response to the poetry and poetics of Spasmodics like Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith; in "'For the Inscape's Sake': Sounding the Self in the Meters of Gerard Manley Hopkins," Summer J. Star proposes intellectual affiliations between Hopkins' metrically imbricated concept of inscape and the nineteenth-century natural language theories of Charles Nadier, Ernest Renan, and Max Muller; "'But the Law Must Itself Be Poetic': Swinburne, Omond, and the New Prosody," by Yisrael Levin, challenges the traditional distinction between poetry and prosody by showing how Swinburne was experimenting, in poems like "The Nympholept," with a form of musical prosody favoring the timing of sounds over the counting of syllables and anticipating the theories of ictus, accent, and periodicity later articulated by T. S. Omond in A Study of Meter (1903) and English Metrists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1907); finally, Cornelia Pearsall's "Blank Verse and the Expansion of England: The Meter of Demeter," proposes that the blank verse lines of this late Tennysonian dramatic speaker participates in a naturalization of empire through verse that is ideologically linked to J. R. Seeley's The Expansion of England (1883).

The remaining four essays of Meter Matters survey the field of nineteenth-century prosody from a broader vantage. Hall's "Introduction: A Great Multiplication of Meters" delves into what he describes as the "supernumerary syllables" of metrical matters not otherwise explored in the collection. Thus, he provides brief and tantalizing discussions of the appearance of prosody in nineteenth-century fiction, of the broad range of theories and theorists of verse in the period, of both women's and the working classes' specific experiences of meter, and of the appearance of prosody in popular-culture venues from illustrated periodicals to the racecourse. In "Meter and Meaning," Isobel Armstrong illustrates the heuristic potential of Hegel's theory of polyrhythmia for studies of nineteenth prosody by using close readings of "Break, Break, Break" and Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper." Generalizing from these representative examples, she argues that, "the post-Christian poets of the late Enlightenment and beyond found ways of mitigating the simplicity of the stress system by putting into play more than one set of stress possibilities" (p. 49). Michael Cohen moves the discussion of meter to the other side of the pond with "Popular Ballads: Rhythmic Remediations in the Nineteenth Century." Concentrating on the efforts of Francis James Child as editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98), Cohen "examines how practices of anthologizing ballads, and the fantasies about the cultural and national past they fostered, became particularly important to the nineteenth-century project of national reconstruction in the United States" (p. 197). The final essay of the volume, Meredith Martin's "Prosody Wars," establishes convincingly the interconnections among poetics, education, and nationalism in Edwardian England. She begins by showing how "prosody was ... buried in Victorian grammars," where "the very definitions of accent, quantity, stress, and time in English verse were dynamic and malleable" (pp. 240, 245). Any

attempt to fix these terms, as in George Saintsbury's monumental History of English Prosody (1906-10), was necessarily an ideological exercise, one that, in Saintsbury's case, Martin argues, was deeply rooted in his own privileged Classical education and his militaristic notion of English national character. Competing notions of national character, both English and Indian, populate Mary Ellis Gibson's new anthology, Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913 (Ohio Univ. Press, 2011), which traces the contours of English language poetry across the subcontinent over the course of the long nineteenth century. Describing her goals as, to "bring forgotten poems back to view ... to re-create the complex conversation among poets that shaped them ... [and] to make these poems literally and culturally legible to American and British readers" (p. 25), Gibson provides selections from forty-three poets, including four appended under the rubric of "Comic and Satiric Poets of the Long Nineteenth Century." Outside of this appendix, poets appear chronologically by date of birth, ranging from Sir William Jones (1746-1794) through Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), and including no poems published after Rabindranath Tagore's receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Later poets' work is thus only partially represented, and the volume as a whole understandably focuses on lyric poetry, at the expense of the long narrative poem. Gibson forthrightly acknowledges both points in her Introduction, which thoughtfully establishes India's cosmopolitan multilingualism in the period; surveys contemporary shifts in publishing and reading practices, particularly the expansion of the printing industry outside of Bengal in the 1840s, and the diversification of writers, poetics, and cultural perspectives that resulted; identifies dominant tropes and recurrent motifs and modes, most notably the recurrence of bardic nationalism; and explains her editorial principles of textual selection and presentation. This introduction, together with Gibson's paratextual apparatus--biographical head notes, brief suggestions for further readings, the inclusion of authors' original learned footnotes, as well as additional helpful identifications of cultural figures and historical events-provides teachers and students with everything necessary for classroom use. And Gibson includes many poems sure to provoke fascinating discussion: three Persian-language-indebted poems from Jones, a paraphrase ("a ghazal of Hafiz"), a transcription of the same in iambic tetrameter ("A Persian Song"), and an original English-language ghazal ("An Ode of Jami") lead off the volume and bring the issue of translation appropriately to the fore; E. L.'s "Kadambini" relocates this subject to the schoolroom, reproducing the playful, broken exchanges between an American teacher and her Indian student, complete with the author's diacritical marks, use of the vernacular, and footnoted translations; the politics of cultural translation emerge in poetic responses to the 1857-58 rebellion from Govin Chunder Dutt ("To Lord Canning"), Mary Eliza Leslie (from Sorrows, Aspirations, and Legends), and Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (Retrospection); finally, the close juxtaposition of poems from Tagore and Rudyard Kipling allows for a rich discussion of poetry's multiple social functions in the period of late colonialism.

Gibson's companion monograph, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore (Ohio Univ. Press, 2011), greatly expands upon the social, political, and bibliographical information provided in the Introduction to Anglophone Poetry, even as it preserves that volume's emphasis upon the conversations, affiliations, and intertextual mediations that shaped English language poetry in India. Making explicit the problematic of translation and colonialism already discernible in the numerous poems included in the anthology, Indian Angles "argues for an understanding of a canon that takes nationalism as a subject of inquiry rather than a criterion for selection" (p. 4). English language poetry in India, for Gibson, is best imagined not as "a sweeping narrative history" but rather as "a tale of arranged marriage among cultures" (pp. 4, 279); which is to say, that her focus is on the often fraught relationships of individual poets to one another and to their familial, linguistic, religious, material, ethnic, and belletristic circumstances. She structures Indian Angles into six chapters, each of which centrally features two to six poets representing the successive generations of the extended family that results from this "marriage": Sir William Jones, Sir John Horsford, and Anna Maria; H. L. V. Derozio and Emma Roberts; David Lester Richardson and Henry Meredith Parker; Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Mary Carshore; Govin Chunder Dutt, Hur Chunder Dutt, Greece Chunder Dut, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, Mary E. Leslie, and Toru Dutt; and Manmohan Ghose, Sarojini Naidu, and Rabindranath Tragore. Working on the anthology and monograph simultaneously has given Gibson an impressive breadth of reference; happily, at moments when less familiar readers may begin to feel overwhelmed, they need only consult Anglophone Poetry to have the primary text at hand. Many of these texts receive meticulous close readings from Gibson-including Jones' "Plassey-Plain" (pp. 31-33), Derozio's "The Harp of India" (pp. 77-79), and the paratexts of Carshore's Songs of the East (pp. 169-173)-who also reconstructs the sometimes highly critical awareness of events in England present in poems like Roberts's "The Rajah's Obsequies," which uses the figure of sati to respond to contemporary debates over married women's property (pp. 95-98), and T. W. Smyth's apocalyptic and borderline regicidal "On the Late Attempted Assassination of the Queen," published in 1843, but most likely written in 1840 (pp. 119-120). This same period witnessed dramatic changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of books in India, and Gibson's third chapter provides an expert historical bibliography of Bengal's new commodity print culture. Literary nationalism inevitably emerges as one product of this expansion of the book and periodical markets, and in her final three chapters Gibson traces this development in English language poetry written in India by British authors and in London by Indian authors. She ultimately argues that the influences of cosmopolitanism and aestheticism, together with the "dynamics of affiliation, of friendship, and of hospitality," should move us to reconfigure literary history beyond the "governing assumptions of ethno-nationalist exclusivity" (p. 230).

Bridging the gap between book history and Victorian poetry criticism, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855-1875 (Ohio Univ. Press, 2011) reconstructs the process of Christmas poetry gift-book production during the "golden age" of wood-engraved illustration. Never constituting more than five percent of book titles at midcentury, with print runs in the thousands, and an advertised cost of twenty-one shillings, or one guinea, these quarto-sized volumes of poetry and pictures were marketed as gifts from men to the important women in their lives and destined to reside in the middle-class drawing room. Whether derided as "vulgar display" or praised for its ability to disseminate elite art to an "audience in need of cultivation," the Christmas gift book dramatically altered both reader-viewers' and writers' experience of verse (p. 3). Over five lavishly illustrated chapters-the book includes sixty-eight illustrations, as well as numerous other decorative features--Kooistra presents case studies of individual texts, including many examples from Tennyson, and illuminates different phases of production, from commissioning to marketing to illustrating to facsimile engraving. Especially in her first three chapters, Kooistra focuses overwhelmingly on the visual business of the gift book, perhaps inevitably favoring descriptive accounts of images over analyses of poems. Readers seeking a more traditionally literary critical approach will find themselves more comfortable in her final two chapters: chapter four offers numerous close readings of the interrelationship between individual poems and their accompanying illustrations in single-author gift books featuring Eliza Cook, Adelaide Anne Proctor, and Jean Ingelow; chapter five is devoted entirely to Tennyson's fraught experience with the gift book, and includes a particularly fertile account of his dismay at Moxon's 1858 edition of The Princess, illustrated by Daniel Maclise (pp. 193-206). As Kooistra reveals, "The gift book that was characteristic of the 1860s did not arise from the collaborative partnerships we think of in relation to the illustrated fiction of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, or Carroll, in which the author worked closely with the artist" (p. 22). Instead, poets, even those with the weight of Tennyson, drastically ceded control of the material form of their art to gift-book publishers, who selected accompanying illustrations and typefaces, arranged words and images on the page, designed marketing strategies for the periodical press, and otherwise controlled their own brand of Christmas serial.

In sheer zeal for its subject, no book reviewed this year surpasses Valentine Cunningham's Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Politics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), which offers a kind of breathless survey of as much of the field as can be contained in its 500-plus pages. Although it alludes in its title to Isobel Armstrong's magisterial Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics, which it may surpass in breadth of reference, Cunningham adopts a very different approach and tone: "My sub-title puts 'poets' first, because I'm not afraid of the fact that poems are produced by poets, actual men and women, living in the real world, who are the actual thinking, feeling, writing channels for all the contents and discontents which poems evince.... So, no Death of the Author here" (p. vii). The combined product of Cunningham's compilation of his 2000 Blackwell's anthology of Victorian poetry and his "lectures and classes at Oxford and elsewhere" (p. vi), Victorian Poetry Now abounds in anecdotes, parentheticals, statistics, definitions, and self-referential quotations, all delivered with the avuncular charisma of a memorable lecturer. The book is divided into two parts, the first of four and the second of six chapters: part one provides an introduction to the linguistic range and basic tools of repetition and compression that would enable one to answer the question, "How do you tell a Victorian poem when you see one?" (p. 55); part two idiosyncratically surveys the contents of Victorian poetry, including one chapter focused on smallness (ranging from poets' uses of the sonnet to the Victorians' interest in fairies), another on poems fascinated with the body, and ending with two chapters that explore the Victorians' obsessions with modernity and their prescient anticipations of post-modern ways of writing and thinking. Academic readers seeking a critical thesis with which to argue are apt to be disappointed, although Cunningham does perform some really deft close reading of poems both widely read--Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (pp. 135-139) and Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (pp. 423-434)--and relatively unfamiliar, as in his illustration of the principle of "Repetition with attitude" using a poem from Clough's 1851 notebooks (pp. 61-67). More general readers looking to broaden their exposure to the rich heterogeneity of Victorian poetry will find a knowledgeable and enthusiastic introduction in Cunningham's Victorian Poetry Now.

More measured in tone than Cunningham, Richard Cronin achieves a similarly capacious survey of Victorian verse in Reading Victorian Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), which, like its predecessors in the Reading Poetry series, is aimed at the undergraduate market. Acknowledging its significant debt to Isobel Armstrong's central thesis of the double poem from Victorian Poetry--"Indeed, almost the whole of this book is an attempt to unpack the various senses that the expression accommodates" (p. 28)--Cronin's book features a series of close readings of individual poems, many of which self-consciously foreground their own status as objects of analysis. The poems chosen for explication are drawn from canonical chestnuts by Arnold, both Brownings, Hopkins, the Rossettis, Swinburne, and Tennyson; poems by less anthologized authors like William Barnes, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, and James Clarence Mangan; and a refreshingly ample selection of works by women poets, including Toru Dutt, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, and Augusta Webster. Loosely structured into eight chapters that gently guide unfamiliar readers through the Victorians' "great poetry museum, which was, rather like the British Museum itself, remarkable for the breadth and the miscellaneousness of its collections" (p. 2), Cronin's readings present themselves as models of sensitive attention to the poetic text itself. Students inspired by his example to explore Victorian poetry more deeply can consult the brief enumerative bibliographies provided at the end of Reading Victorian Poetry. Keyed to the specific authors, texts, and motifs explored in the chapters, these descriptive lists direct students to major articles and books that have shaped the modern critical field, many of which have been featured in prior installments of "Guide to the Year's Work" in Victorian Poetry.