Victorian Poetry

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E. WARWICK SLINN

Experimental form in Victorian poetry

In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wanted to write "a poem of a new
class," one that included "[conversations & events" and "philosophical
dreaming &c digression." 1 She also wanted to purify George Gordon
Byron's sexually contentious poetry, to write "a Don Juan, without the
mockery &C impurity." But this moral aim, while acknowledging her wish
to elude the precedents created by Byron, was less important than her
larger formal purpose. This desire to compose a new poetic form, one that
would adapt established styles to contemporary needs, and particularly one
that would combine narrative and speculative commentary with the
requirements of aesthetic unity, typifies many Victorian poets. It led to
widespread poetic play that transgressed boundaries between the three
classical genres identified by the Greeks - epic (or narrative), drama, and
lyric. And in the twentieth century it led in turn to standard critical
discussions of Victorian experiments with form. 2

Established accounts of experimentation tend to work within a critical
legacy that associates experimental writing with internal features of
structure and style. More recent critical practice, however, directs our
attention to broader cultural contexts and particularly to the potential for
cultural critique. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, for instance,
distinguish two types of critique: institutional critique, which aims to
expose the conditions and principles which govern existing institutions and
cultural practices, and transformative critique, which aims not only to
question the conditions which sustain existing institutions but to change
cultural practice. Poetry, I suggest, is more likely to offer examples of
institutional critique. 3 In other words, when genres are reshaped or
recovered (like medieval ballads in the eighteenth century), they may test or
expose paradigms of contemporary values (reason, orderliness, univers-
ality) as well as aesthetic norms (neoclassical decorum). Alternatively,
when new forms are developed they tend to cohere culturally at the point
where their characteristics become recognizable or even dominant within

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