Experimental form in Victorian poetryan emerging social system (such as the nineteenth-century novel of
manners). The consequence of this approach is to broaden the cultural
significance of experimental writing. It can involve testing cultural conven-
tions and assumptions, where testing means checking the resilience and
flexibility of received literary norms, seeing if shifts in cultural practices
and beliefs require new cultural forms. Conversely, it may entail seeing
whether new or revitalized forms might themselves provoke changed
cultural perceptions. In this sense, literary experimentation functions as a
form of social dynamism, breaking up the inertia of linguistic habits and,
ambiguously, questioning or rehabilitating them.
By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Romantic poets had
already begun this kind of cultural testing. Generic categories had long
been challenged and reshaped by several decades of shifting poetic struc-
tures, ones that adapted old forms (ballads, odes, and pastoral) and
refashioned old hybrids (the lyrical ballads of William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or the lyrical drama of Byron and Percy Bysshe
Shelley). Victorian poets certainly continued to employ a range of differing
forms. But in this general cultural shift they tended to sustain further
movements and variations rather than offer sudden innovation - Barrett
Browning, for instance, had to acknowledge that Byron had in part
anticipated her purpose. At the same time, the one generic exception is the
dramatic monologue, and this innovative form helps us to understand what
is at stake in other modes of poetic experimentation in the period. Critics
generally concur that this type of poem stands as the main Victorian
contribution to a distinctly modern, if not Modernist, literature. With its
hybrid combination of lyric and drama, the dramatic monologue produced
an intensive focus on the exigencies and processes of human subjectivity.
This concentration on human agency - on the psychology and politics of
individuation - draws attention to a consistent feature of Victorian poetic
forms, as the title of Langbaum's famous 1957 study, The Poetry of
Experience, suggests. Victorian forms emphasize a particular conceptual
strand of experimentation: namely, that which overlaps with the modern
category of experience.
The English word experiment derives from the Latin experimentum
(proof or trial) and experiri (prove, test, try), which is also the source of
experientia (experience). 4 If experience is that which is based on actual
observation, on practical acquaintance with events considered as a source of
knowledge, then the experimental is that which is based on experience only
- on direct acquaintance or personal knowledge, not on separate or agreed
authority. These close correlations between experience, experiment, and
testing produce a sense of knowledge as incomplete, neither authoritative
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