Victorian Poetry

KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES

Poetry and literary tradition

To some extent, of course, all criticism deals with the relationship between
poetry and society: even formalist critics, who look at the poem as a self-
contained unit, often engage with the social effects of their close readings.
But poetry is also a specific kind of writing, different from magazine
articles, nonfiction prose, and novels. Increasingly, as the nineteenth
century progressed, part of the value placed on poetry lay in its difference
from other types of writing, particularly writing produced for a mass
audience. To understand Victorian poetry, we need to know how concepts
like "literature" and "tradition" - concepts that announced the difference
of poetry from other writing - both shaped and were shaped by Victorian
poems.

The idea of tradition is perhaps most evident in the practice of allusion
through which a poem announces its relation to previously written poems.
In general terms, tradition means that succeeding generations of poets
assert their dynamic engagement with the poetic past. In other words, since
tradition represents the view that the great poems of great poets occupy
positions of high artistic value, emergent poets must learn how to absorb
and reproduce the cultural authority accorded to a venerated poetic canon.
At the same time, emergent poets must not simply imitate the great works
that have gone before them. Aspiring poets must instead assert their own
distinctiveness and originality. Tradition, then, involves each new poet
claiming his or her affiliation with and independence from the great poetic
past. When Lancelot appears in Tennyson's poem, he, unlike the Lady,
already has an extensive literary identity - Arthurian legend makes clear
who he is, and what Camelot is, even if Shalott remains unknown to us.
Through Lancelot, the poem claims some connection between the medieval
and the Victorian, and through the presence of the knight and lady on his
shield, it also recalls Spenser's epic poem on the virtues and the establish-
ment of Britain. Yet by positioning him on the periphery, and making the
Lady its central agent, the poem claims both a relation to and a difference
from the traditions of Arthurian legend and epic poetry: it tells a story that
these traditions cannot tell, at a new and different historical moment.

Perhaps the most important figure for thinking about poetic tradition in
the second half of the twentieth century is Harold Bloom, whose work of
the 1960s and 1970s revitalized the reading of influence in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century poetry. Whereas Bloom's earlier criticism - The Ringers
in the Tower (1971), for example - valued Romantic over Victorian poetry,
he comes to value Victorian poetry much more highly in later work like
Poetry and Repression (TL<)J6). Insisting that poems can only be made out

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