Victorian Poetry

KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES

1485), Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-96), and varieties of
quest romance - it both courts and refuses the separation of writing and the
real. And in allowing issues of gender and sexuality to turn a story about
aesthetic production into a story about a woman who dies for love, the
poem problematizes gender and sexuality as well. The present chapter
traces the responses of critics in the twentieth century to the questions that
both Tennyson's poem and Victorian poetry in general pose.

Poetry and society

The problem of the relationship between "poetry" and "society" can only
emerge at a historical moment when aesthetic activity appears different in
kind from economic and political activity. When the market replaces the
patron as the source of economic gain and the means of distribution to an
audience, poets paradoxically are both more and less independent. No
longer subject to the whims of patrons or to the favor of a court, they are
instead at the mercy of a larger, more distant audience whose purchasing
power can make or break them. At the point, then, at which the artist
becomes just another producer for the market, artists claim to be special
people: autonomous geniuses who through their unique imaginative abil-
ities have access to truths otherwise not available to the culture. As Marxist
critic Raymond Williams points out, this ideology of imagination is not
only a compensation for the poet but also "an emphasis on the embodiment
in art of certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development
of society towards an industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or
even destroying." 7
Art's separation from everyday life is a constant concern of Victorian
poetry. In "The Lady of Shalott," aesthetic activity - singing, weaving,
writing - is fundamentally shaped by the Lady's separation from the
outside world both in that this separation is a necessary condition of
production, and in that all of her activities aim at bridging the gap of that
separation. Not only, then, does the poem suggest that poetry and society
point toward different kinds of things but also toward things defined
against each other, whose relationship must then inevitably be problematic.
Yet the problem of the relationship between poetry and society also
implies some connection between these two categories. Just as the category
of art is under construction in the nineteenth century, so too is the category
of the social - that is to say, the way in which people imagine themselves as
belonging to groups linked by common ideas about what it means to be
fully human. Art's function as celebrant and preserver of private values
makes it very useful in the project of defining the human. Lancelot, at the

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