Poetry in the late nineteenth centuryglican, monarchical, and evidently Tory, or at least acquiescent and
deferential to the imperialism that underpinned official England.
That Swinburne and William Morris were ruled out of consideration is
not, therefore, to be wondered at. For official England felt itself under
threat from "Demos." This is why Watson and his reactionary contempor-
aries made such great play of both their patriotism and their "strenuous
and virile" muse. If Republicanism appeared a French disease, so too did
those tendencies that threaten all that is manly: Gautier, Zola, and other
"unwholesome sweetmeats." This, without question, is the language of
anti-Decadence, of an especially repellent strain of posturing that finds
expression in the imperialist 1890s poetry of W.E. Henley and Sir Henry
Newbolt 19 and then feeds into much patriotic verse written at the outbreak
of the Great War in 1914. I do not intend to say more about this
development beyond remarking that it provides one more manifestation of
the place that poetry occupied in the public eye. At this time, the poetry
favored by the state operates as a form of official utterance for imperialist
"healthy" England, and the major enemy within is precisely that "Deca-
dent," urban, and degenerative spirit - as its opponents were prompt to
label it - about which I now want to comment.
We have seen how Watson thought that Shelley started the rot. And
certainly Shelley, atheist, Republican, ardent believer in sexual equality,
came to be regarded in the later years of the nineteenth century as a
dangerous force. Hence Matthew Arnold's famous recoil from the account
of Shelley's life provided by Edward Dowden in 1886. 20 Anyone familiar
with this period recalls Arnold's shocked expostulation, "What a set! What
a world." 21 Fewer perhaps remember that this essay is so taken up with
that "set" and that "world" that he is left at the very end to remark: "Of his
poetry I have not space now to speak" (XI, 327). The implication, however,
is unmistakable. Given the life, what hope for the art?
Arnold's unstated belief in the inextricable connection between poet and
work was upheld by many nineteenth-century male writers, perhaps most
memorably by Carlyle where he comments that Goethe's poetry expressed
"no separate faculty, no mental handicraft; but the voice of the whole
harmonious manhood." "[N]ay," Carlyle added, "it is the very harmony,
the living and life-giving harmony of that rich manhood which forms his
poetry" ("Goethe" [1828], XXVI, 208). By the time Arnold pronounced
judgment on Shelley's life, harmonious manhood had come to seem the last
thing that more recent poets were interested in upholding. Hence, perhaps,
Arnold's tone of studied sorrow. Very probably, Arnold lamented how
Shelley's "set" betrayed the cherished values of "sweetness and light" that
Arnold associated with the "faith and tradition of Oxford." Oxford's
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