Victorian Poetry

The critical fortunes of Victorian poetry

help us to be more self-conscious about how we articulate the presence of
these problems in our own culture.

Poetry and representation

"The Lady of Shalott" is only one among many Victorian poems concerned
with the slipperiness of representation, the tendency of language and other
signs to take on a life of their own. The Lady reproduces in her weaving
what she sees in her magic mirror of the world outside but whether that
mirror provides an accurate reflection is by no means clear. Lancelot, who
seems to precipitate her desire for contact with the real, is himself the
bearer of another representation (the knight kneeling to a lady), just as he is
a dazzle of reflected light, and also a reflection in the river. As a mysterious
decorative object, bearing the label of her name as she floats into Camelot,
the Lady herself is a sign of which Lancelot's remark - "She has a lovely
face" - is both an adequate and inadequate reading.

Modernist ideas about how poetry ought to work shaped the early
criticism of Victorian poetry - the idea of the poem as a self-contained
system, one conveying its meaning through language and imagery and
yielding its truth only to the intelligent and persistent reader was founda-
tional to the development of academic criticism. The ornateness of
Victorian poetry and the diffuseness of its imagery seemed to the New
Critics to militate against the virtues of ambiguity and paradox. It is for
this reason that many of the examples of bad or second-rate poetry in the
notes to Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and in the poems
collected in Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry (1938) happen to
be Victorian. In Understanding Poetry, for example, a poem by the popular
writer Adelaide Anne Procter is pronounced "stupid, trivial and not worthy
of the subject," 22 and the study question for Tennyson's "The Palace of
Art" (1832, revised 1842) clearly expects a negative reply: "But does the
imagery really bear a close and functional relation to the idea of the
poem?" 23 Later, in The Well-Wrought Urn, Brooks praises Tennyson's lyric
"Tears Idle Tears" (from The Princess [1847]) but finds it atypical of the
poet: "perhaps the last English poet one would think of associating with
the subtleties of paradox and ambiguity." 24

The revaluation of Victorian poetry in the 1950s was primarily organized
around questions of poetry's social role, rather than language or poetic
technique. When critics return to social questions in the 1980s and 1990s,
they do so with a renewed interest i n issues of representation, and a new
vocabulary for discussing these issues that comes out of deconstruction and
post-structuralist psychoanalysis. In Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver's

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