Victorian Poetry

E. WARWICK SLINN

15 Such an effect should be distinguished from the work of the "Spasmodic" poets
(Philip Bailey, Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell), also writing in mid-century,
who sustained an elaborate expressionism seeking the truths of personal
subjectivity. Their unquestioning absorption of Romantic aesthetics i s illustrated
by a remark about creativity in Smith's "A Life Drama" (1854): "it was his
nature / To blossom into song, as 'tis a tree's / To leaf itself in April" (Smith,
Poems [Boston, MA: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854], 18). For further
information on the "Spasmodics," see Mark A. Weinstein, William Edmond-
stoune Aytoun and the Spasmodic Controversy (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1968).
16 W. David Shaw, "Philosophy and Genre in Victorian Poetics: The Idealist
Legacy," ELH 52 (1985), 472.
17 Shaw, "Philosophy and Genre in Victorian Poetics," 473.
18 Bornstein, Poetic Remaking, 39.
19 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London:
Routledge, 1993), 12.
20 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry 13.
21 See, for example, Loy D. Martin, Browning's Dramatic Monologues and the
Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985),
and E. Warwick Slinn, The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (Charlottes-
ville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991).
22 See A. Dwight Culler, "Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue," PMLA 90
(i975), 366-85.
23 Tennyson, The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ed. Hallam Tennyson,
Eversley edition, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908), IV, 271.
24 There has been debate about whether or not Voloshinov and Bakhtin are the
same person. For a dialogical view of utterance, see V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism
and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik
(New York: Seminar Press, 1973); this work was first published in Russian in
1929.
25 Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 413.

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