KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESernism and the New Criticism valued formal and technical "difficulty" in
art. Unlike Tennyson, who wrote for a general audience, poets like Eliot
sought to distinguish their work from easily consumable mass-cultural
forms. A poem like Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) could be bedtime
reading for either workers or the Queen. But the successful interpretation
of Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922) requires a reader with a vast amount of
literary and historical knowledge. The new profession of scholarly literary
criticism depended on "difficulty" for its very existence: university students
needed to be trained in techniques of close reading and analysis i n order to
be able to appreciate real poetry, and trained out of their uncultured tastes
for sentimental and easily understood verse. Most of the examples of
second-rate poetry in the notes to Richards's Principles of Literary Criti-
cism (1924) and in the poems collected in Understanding Poetry (1938),
Brooks and Warren's famous textbook, are Victorian.
After the Second World War, however, Victorian literature came into its
own. New Critical modes of reading were still dominant but the renewed
interest in the relationship between literature and society made the topi-
cality of Victorian literature and poetry attractive. As the study of literature
became more and more professionalized, Victorian poetry also became a
field of specialization that grew rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s when post-structuralism (in the
form of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis) provided new ways
of reading Romantic poetry, literary theory hardly touched the work of
Victorian poets. Yet the revival of interest in questions of culture, gender,
history, and sexuality during the 1980s benefited the study of Victorian
poetry considerably. Indeed, almost all versions of the standard story about
the field in the twentieth century end with the invocation of some point in
the recent past, or perhaps just now arising, or anticipated in the near
future, when Victorian poetry receives its proper due at last. 5
This story is historically useful in that it shows the unique position of
Victorian poetry as that area of literary endeavor upon whose devaluation
the profession of literary criticism was founded. It is also rhetorically
satisfying: an account of the slow progress of a mistreated Cinderella of
genres toward the inevitable encounter with the slipper-bearing theorist
who will reveal her true worth. For these reasons, I join the critics who tell
the standard story. But I also want to add to this story. Literary criticism
may have been founded on Victorian poetry's devaluation but the central
issues of literary criticism were first articulated as issues, with great
sophistication, in Victorian poetry itself. What art is and what its relation
to the rest of society might be, what literature is and how it changes over
time, how language and representation work, what gender and sexuality
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