From Blake to Beardsley: "on some of the characteristics of modern poetry".

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen

"'I sing,' says the modern Bard, 'speaking to the eye alone, by the help of type-founders, papermakers, compositors, ink balls, folding, and stitching.'" Published in a review of Eliza Cook's poetry in the Anglo-American in 1847, the statement testifies to the nineteenth century's growing recognition of the expressiveness of the poetic book, whether in elite folio, high-end quarto, everyday octavo, or, as in this case, common reader's duodecimo. (1) Observing that the days of the oral tradition, when "the song and the singer were one," had been supplanted by print culture, the reviewer went on to note the compensations offered by the visual and material: "For the charm thus lost, we must make up, as we can, in other ways. The painter's and graver's art does something; the reader's mind must do the rest" (p. 343).

When William Blake, in his "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence, had his piper substitute pipe for pen and stain "the water clear" in order to write "a book that all may read," (2) he too commented on poetry's metamorphosis in print culture. He enacted this insight materially, in the bibliographic, linguistic, iconic, and graphic features he conceived and fashioned himself. Except that all may not read the book he made: few of us have been fortunate enough to view, let alone handle, one of the physical copies of the Songs of Innocence from 1789, 1795, 1802, 1804, or 1811. (3) As we know, none of these copies is identical in coloring, sequence, or contents. Each necessarily stages its own argument about poetry, pictures, print, and the possibilities of pastoral innocence.

Until relatively recently, most of us read Songs of Innocence in printed collections and anthologies, assisted by facsimile reproductions of plates from one of the extant copies. In the digital age, thanks to the work of Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi on the William Blake Archive, we have recourse to virtual representations of multiple copies and a better understanding of the uniqueness of each of Blake's individual productions. (4) But we still, for the most part, read and teach Blake's poetry apart from the material forms he designed for its expression. And perhaps this says as much about our own limitations as it does about access. How do we "read" Blake's graphic ornaments in the midst of poetic lines? Do semantics always trump iconic and graphic elements? How much close attention do nonreferential squiggles require? Does color signify? What is the meaning of paper, layout, calligraphy and sequence? In this most material of poetic productions, how much does matter actually matter?

Blake's creative control over the processes of production was unique, but his interest in the expressiveness of the printed page was not. As we are beginning to recognize, an extraordinary number of nineteenth-century poets, artists, book designers, and publishers experimented with the interplay between bibliographic form and linguistic and iconic content. Yet our study of Victorian poems as embodied, graphic forms is in its infancy. As Johanna Drucker remarks in one of the essays collected here, we lack a basic "critical vocabulary for talking about the organization and composition of pages, the way these create development over a sequence of openings, the use of patterns, decoration, typographic formats and styles, and the specific ways the methods of print production are thought about in the conception of a work. Bindings, typographic treatment, and other matters are usually left for bibliophiles to ponder in their own peculiar backwater of a terrain once known as bibliographical studies" (VP 48, no. 1: 139). Contending that bibliographic forms are as significant as linguistic, this special issue of Victorian Poetry and the Book Arts explores some methodological and conceptual premises and vocabulary for talking about Victorian poetry as physical text. Analyzing the material features of a wide range of poetic texts made in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, its essays historicize and theorize "Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry."

My subtitle is, of course, taken directly from Arthur Henry Hallam's review of Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1831, in which he famously articulated what made the bard's poetry modern in linguistic and semantic expression, subject matter, and point of view. Tellingly, Hallam contrasted Tennyson's sensuous poetry of images for the mind's eye with the popular publications of his day that combined verses with "pretty illustrations," taking particular aim at the new illustrated edition of Robert Montgomery's Oxford. While Hallam's analysis of Tennyson's early poetry was astute, his reverence for a dematerialized poetic spirit or "genius," view of poetry "as a sort of magic" and concomitant contempt for ordinary readers--"the stupid readers, or the voracious readers, or the malignant readers, or the readers after dinner!" (5) --was out of step with some of the very material characteristics of modern poetry in the nineteenth century. From Blake's etched and hand-colored plates for Songs of Innocence to Beardsley's remarkable line-block illustrations for John Lane's edition of Oscar Wilde's Salome, and everything in between-including, as we have seen, ordinary trade publications like Eliza Cook's Poems-nineteenth-century poetry expressed its meanings materially, in the physical features encoded in its bibliographic forms. One of the dominant characteristics of modern poetry is, in fact, the multiple ways in which its makers have realized the inherently iconic and visual quality of poetry itself on the printed page.

At the most basic visual and material level, a poem distinguishes itself as verse rather than prose by a typographic layout peculiar to its form. Incorporating shortened lines set into wide margins, and using white space between stanzas to mark its various conceptual movements, poetry as a written form is recognizable first by its "Attic shape" and only secondarily by its "unheard melodies." Matters of typography, layout, paper, and format are therefore of material import to the meanings a poem expresses and the readers it interpellates. Tennyson's "Mariana," for instance, is a different work in its various appearances in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical of 1830, the Moxon illustrated edition of 1857, Macmillan's double-columned Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson of 1897, and Christopher Ricks's annotated scholarly edition of the Poems of Tennyson in three volumes (2nd ed.) in 1987. Each distinct version of "Mariana" makes precise historical statements visually and materially through the expressiveness of physical text. The "theory of versions" supported by current textual studies helps us "shift our conception of the artwork itself," as George Bornstein notes, "from product to process," allowing us to read each text as a palimpsest or "site ... in which acts of composition and transmission occur before our eyes." (6)

This bibliographic insight allows us to move from an author-focused understanding of Victorian poetry to a social and historical conception of the work as the ongoing outcome of many makers. We might say, elaborating on the work of D. F. Mackenzie, that there is nothing accidental on the printed page: every jot signifies to the reader. (7) The acts of composition made by typographers, compositors, printers, editors, publishers, illustrators, engravers, and binders form the very elements that make the poetic text "present" in the world. (8) Moreover, the readers for whom the book was made are inscribed in the book's material features. The materiality of a book-"its every particle," as Pierre Macherey insists--"manifests, uncovers, what it cannot say." (9) Or, as Jerome J. McGann puts it: "Various readers and audiences are hidden in our texts, and the traces of their multiple presence are scripted at the most material levels." (10)

The narratives we have built about Victorian poetry have usually begun with the poet-maker. But what happens to our understanding if we move authority from the author "in favor of an authority more dispersed among those who actually bring the text to its published form" (Bernstein, p. 4)? One result is a renewed attention to the paratextual apparatuses and social institutions that brought poets and readers together in historically specific ways. Perhaps the most important of these was the illustrated periodical press, whose historical development touches Victorian poetry at every level of its making and reading practices. From its emergence in the 1830s and 1840s, illustrated serial publication printed in double columns disrupted by inset images and a range of typographic features dominated Victorian reading experience. We are only beginning to understand the ways in which the illustrated press shaped contemporary readers' visual/verbal literacy, their expectation that poetry and pictures belonged together, and their understanding of poetry's place in cultural experience and everyday life.

The Victorian periodical's pictured page, layout, paper, and graphics inscribed social and cultural values in its material features and constructed its middle-class readers. Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were very aware of this when they set out to make The Yellow Book an avant-garde "modern magazine." The Yellow Book's modernity of form was expressed visually and materially, through the bibliographic codes of format, set up, typography, and-especially-the physical separation of visual and verbal contents. "The pictures," their Prospectus announced, "will in no case serve as illustrations to the letterpress, but each will stand by itself as an independent contribution." (11) By the fin de siecle, the pictured page had become such an integral part of the ordinary reader's experience that it was necessary to "make it new" for the modern age by dispensing with double-page formats and inset, illustrative pictures. Poetry now appeared in its own space, untouched by the extraneous effects of topical news, consumer products, serial fiction, and pictorial commentary. The significance of this shift has yet to be fully canvassed.

Despite the centrality of poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals, The Wellesley Index did not include verses in its indexing apparatus. (12) As a result, we have been hampered in our understanding of the complex relationships between book publication and the periodical press. Linda K. Hughes's essay shows how the publishing practices of one of the period's most important illustrated magazines, Once a Week, constitutes a "vital link in the history of Victorian illustrated poetry." Pursuing an analysis focused on a range of "visual effects" rather than an author or artist-centered study, Hughes examines poetry's role in popular culture and discusses some of the elements that distinguish illustrated poems in periodicals from those in books. Her essay also lays the groundwork for future exploration of the important continuities between the two forms of publication. Hughes's analysis of the "editor-effect" in periodical publication, for instance, is also applicable to some volume publications, such as the Christmas gift books published by the Dalziel Brothers in their "Fine Art Book" series. In gift books such as Home Thoughts and Home Scenes in Original Poems and Pictures (Routledge 1864), or A Round of Days (Routledge 1866), the Dalziel Brothers combined their usual role as engraver and printer with that of editor/author, selecting appropriate subjects and commissioning poets and artists. As annual Christmas publications, moreover, their Fine Art Gift books were also, in effect, a form of serial publication, connecting with the periodical press through a common mode of production, while interpellating a well-heeled reader who could lay out a guinea for a luxury goods item.

The illustrated periodical press also impinges on the publication of Victorian poetry in very material ways through the technologies of reproduction and dissemination. When wood engraving emerged in the 1830s and 1840s as an inexpensive and convenient form of reproducing images in large print runs, it also introduced new possibilities in the art of the book. Because wood engraving is a relief process, set up simultaneously with the compositor's leads, pictures and poetry developed new relationships on a shared printed page. As Hughes demonstrates, in Once a Week, the adjacency of poetry and pictures in periodicals could introduce arbitrary associations as well as planned partnerships in a "magazine of visual effects."

The history of nineteenth-century poetic publishing also demonstrates the extent to which technology and material conditions constrain what can be expressed at a particular historical moment. Before he launched his Kelmscott Press at the fin de siecle, William Morris was unable to produce his books in the material forms he envisioned. He and Edward Burne-Jones had to abandon their collaborative Earthly Paradise project of the 1860s, and his remarkable Book of Verse of 1870 exists as a unique, hand-written and hand-painted manuscript, bound in vellum by Riviere. (13) His Pre-Raphaelite colleague, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was similarly fascinated by the idea of the book as an aesthetic unit, and, like Morris, experimented throughout his life with different approaches to it. In his essay in this collection, Jerome J. McGann shows how Rossetti's fascination with the book arts was lifelong, from the illustrated magazine he and his siblings created in childhood, through to the publications he designed at the end of his career. McGann argues that Rossetti's influence was foundational for modern book artists because "he was seen to have grasped, for an age of mechanical reproduction, the idea of the total book, and to have realized it as a bibliographical idea." His Pre-Raphaelite inheritors--particularly Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman--brought the art of the book to a new level within the possibilities of commercial publishing in the 1890s. In books like Oscar Wilde's The Sphinx, designed by Ricketts for The Bodley Head, or Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, designed by Housman for Macmillan, we see the book conceived as an entire unit. From format and paper to cover, typography, and lettering, and from graphic ornament to illustration, the bibliographic features of these books do more than construct an apt architecture for the poems they house: they embody, enact, and express them.

As keen as the Pre-Raphaelites were about collaborative artistic processes, the complex associations of art and literature, and the book as an expressive form, their short-lived periodical, The Germ (1850), was the only illustrated publication this group of artists and poets produced. Here we see an attempt to realize the printed image as an art object in codex culture with the use of an artist's etching for each of the four numbers. As individuals, different Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets also experimented with a variety of collaborations in commercial publishing, in both periodical and book form. The most significant of these are Christina Rossetti's first two volumes of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866), both produced with illustrative frontispieces and title pages by her brother, Dante Gabriel. In binding, format, typography, and illustration, these books anticipate the unified designs of the so-called Fine Printing Revival ushered in by the work of Morris at Kelmscott and Ricketts at the Vale Press, and realized in the books designed by Housman and others for John Lane at The Bodley Head. In 1901, Joseph Pennell, President of the newly formed Society of Illustrators, published a limited edition of the Moxon Tennyson, dating "a revolution in the art of Black-and-White" from the famous Pre-Raphaelite illustrations by Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti that appeared in 1857. Despite his enthusiasm for the artists' interpretive draftsmanship, however, Pennell was hostile to the wood engravers who cut their designs and therefore celebrated the new photomechanical processes that emancipated the artist (he claimed) from the translations of the engraver. (14)

Technological limitations form part of the story of Edward Lear's career-long illustrations of Tennyson's poetry as well. Since linear wood engraving could not reproduce the tonal qualities of his drawings, the artist experimented with lithography and, later, autotype, but was never able to find an adequate reproductive process. Nevertheless, as Richard Maxwell demonstrates in his essay, one can trace a "developing theory and practice of book illustration" from the artist's Journals through to his Landscape Illustrations of Tennyson. Left unfinished at the artist's death, the Landscape Illustrations exist only in a series of wash drawings in the Houghton Library's Special Collections. These works show a fascinating continuation of the popular nineteenth-century practice of illustrating verses with scenic pictures, a practice that turned a volume of poetry into a form of travel book. (15) This pictorial tradition maintained the documentary association of poetry with place even as the technologies of representation changed, in works as varied as Samuel Rogers' Italy (1831), with steel-engraved vignettes after Thomas Stothard and J.M.W. Turner; Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape (1862), with its wood-engraved images of Southern England accompanied by Tom Taylor's verses; and Scotland: Her Songs and Scenery (1867), illustrated with photographs taken on location. Lear's unpublished pictures for Tennyson's poetry are innovative within this tradition because, rather than attempting to picture the scene as seen by the poet, he sketched landscapes from Monaco, Greece, and the Alps that show the truth of the "visual effects," if not the specific places, Tennyson's poetry describes.

Bound up together, printed on the same page, or facing each other across double-page openings, poetry and pictures in the nineteenth century demanded a balanced attention. Nevertheless, as Johanna Drucker reminds us, "the two registers of image and language are markedly distinct." It is "illustration's difference from verbal text" that Nicholas Frankel's essay on The London Garland (1895) explores. A publication originating with Joseph Pennell and his Society of Illustrators, this fin.de.siecle anthology was, like some of the Dalziel Fine Art Books of the 1860s--for example, Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, which was based on Arthur Boyd Houghton's illustrations, or Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape, which took the artist's drawings as its starting point-very much an artist-centered book. Visual works assumed priority, while poetic works "illustrated" the visual content. However, rather than commissioning poets to "write up" the pictures as the Dalziels had done, the Society of Illustrators hired W. E. Henley to do the editorial work, while allowing the numerous artists free reign in their pictorial approaches and selected poems. The pictures--reproduced by either line-block or half-tone process--show the diversity of graphic styles at the fin de siecle, as well as the contradictory independence and interdependence of visual and verbal art. In this, A London Garland shared many similarities with its contemporary periodical counterpart, The Yellow Book. Unlike The Yellow Book, however, A London Garland unites its pages through its textual decorations. As Frankel demonstrates, the anthology's illuminated capitals create a bridge connecting the poetic and visual elements of the volume.

Illuminated capitals, printer's devices, borders, rules, typographic fonts, illustrations, and the like are graphic elements of books that our readings do not usually take into account. Johanna Drucker's challenging essay demonstrates that it is possible to perform a critical reading of a literary work through attention to its purely graphic properties. Her analysis of Le Petit Journal des Refusees also shows the international reach of print and popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century. In San Francisco in 1896, Gelett Burgess produced a unique work of book art that managed simultaneously to parody the avant-garde Yellow Book and popular works of American print culture, while commenting on the social and print contexts of literary production. As Drucker demonstrates, the "graphical features are both an embodiment of, and index to, the sensibility and ideas" of works, whether they be fine-art objects or products of mass culture.

Modern authorship, these works remind us, is corporate and social, a characteristic of Victorian poetry that urges us to read it in its historicized instantiations. In a selective survey of nineteenth-century book design, Jerome J. McGann's essay emphasizes how many individuals and types of agents were involved in creating poetry books in the period, and shows why "the expressive authority latent in all bibliographic code" matters to hermeneutic practice. In a series of case studies drawn from both American and British publications, McGann demonstrates how social designs and intellectual concepts are expressed physically in the material features of the book. In its historical, theoretical, and critical range, this essay maps a significant transatlantic context for nineteenth-century poetry publication and the book arts. Together with the other contributors to this collection, McGann asks us to read Victorian poetry and the book arts as an embodied "literature by design." (16)

Notes

(1) "Eliza Cook's Poetry," The Anglo-American 9, no. 15 (July 31, 1847): 343. As William St. Claire observes, there is a significant correlation between nineteenth-century bibliographic formats and readers, whereby "[t]he different formats ... (folio, quarto, octavo, and duodecimo), can be regarded as descending points on a demand curve." See The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 32.

(2) William Blake, "Introduction," Songs of Innocence, Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson and David V. Erdman (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 54-55.

(3) The editors of the William Blake Archive cite the following printings of Songs of Innocence: 16 (or possibly 17) copies in 1789; 8 copies in 1795; 3 in 1802; 3 in 1804; and 2 in 1811. These printings relate to Songs of Innocence as an individual work, not to its combined printings in Songs of Innocence and Experience. See The William Blake Archive, ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, November 13, 1997, http://www.blakearchive.org/ (accessed July 23, 2009).

(4) William Blake, The Songs of Innocence, copy B, object 3, and copy U, object 3. The William Blake Archive. Both copies are from 1789. Copy B, the Library of Congress copy, is printed in raw sienna; copy U, the Houghton Library copy, is uniquely printed in black ink.

(5) Arthur Henry Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poetry of Alfred Tennyson," first published in The Englishman's Magazine, 1831; reprinted in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne Rundle (Peterborough: Broadview, 1999), pp. 1190, 1193, 1205.

(6) George Bornstein, Introduction, Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 3-4.

(7) In Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, D.F. McKenzie takes issue with Sir Walter Greg's influential distinction between "substantives" (words) and "accidentals" (non-verbal elements), arguing that "the non-verbal elements of the typographic notations ..., the very disposition of space itself, have an expressive function in conveying meaning" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 17.

(8) Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, forward by Richard Macksey (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 1.

(9) Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 84,

(10) Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 10.

(11) Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley, Prospectus to The Yellow Book (April 1894), p. i.

(12) See Linda K. Hughes, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies," Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 91-125.

(13) See A Book of Verse: A facsimile of the manuscript written in 1870 by William Morris (London: Scolar Press, 1982).

(14) Some Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, with a preface by Joseph Pennell, treating of the illustrations of the sixties, and an Introduction by W. Holman Hunt (London: Freemantle, 1901), pp. x, xiv.

(15) See Gillen Wood's chapter, "Illustrations Tourism Photography," in The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

(16) As a particular instantiation of the thesis of this collection, see the scholarly facsimiles published in the "Literature by Design 1880-1930" Rice University Press series co-edited by Jerome McGann and Nicholas Frankel, whose premise is that the form of the book and its "visible language" bear very materially on the meanings expressed by the work.