E. WARWICK SLINN(the idealist emphases of Romantic aesthetics), whereas the latter suggests
process and incompleteness (the gaps of Romantic irony). Fundamental to
this organic concept of form, therefore, is a conflict - one that Romantic
practice could not ultimately avoid - between form as embodied essence
(complete product, unified perfection) and form as material process (sen-
sible effects, dynamic shaping, empty ceremony). If Romantic poems
accentuate the former, then Victorian poems strive to accommodate the
latter.
The claims of idealist poetics about the innate truth of organic form tend
to presuppose an essentialism that is inherent in the individual organism. It
is as if the organism can be separated from its support systems or mediums
of development and growth. This assumption informs the strong emphasis
in Romantic poetry on lyrical modes - such as the ode, the hymn, pastoral,
and the sonnet - which articulate the voices of solitary speakers. It also
nurtured twentieth-century tendencies to treat poetic form as if it were self-
enclosed, leading in the 1930s and 1940s to influential New Critical views
of the poem as icon. According to this critical approach, poetry was to be
viewed as a well-wrought urn whose imaginative success was demonstrated
by its internal coherence, where all parts mutually support a homogenous
whole. 11 For both Romantic poets and New Critics, organic form was also
most successfully realized in shorter lyrics where the poetic artifact could
more readily establish its formal unity. Longer forms, however, shift
inevitably toward the urgency of temporal process, thus affecting their own
structural components. Wordsworth's The Prelude, for instance, as an
attempt to represent the growth of a poet's imagination, keeps changing its
size from two books (in 1802) to thirteen (in 1805) and eventually to
fourteen (in 1850). If idealist essentialism is more readily represented in
shorter forms, then the move in Victorian poetry away from personalized
and homogeneous lyrics toward dramatic-lyrical and epic-narrative-lyrical
hybrids suggests a growing dissatisfaction with the essentialist assumptions
of organic poetics. Such hybrids shift individual expressiveness away from
isolated subjectivism toward social contexts and culturally produced
discursive processes. Consequently, formal experimentation by Victorian
poets continually suggests the inseparability of material reality from the
sentient subject's experience.
As he does for so many Victorian poetic issues, Matthew Arnold
epitomizes this disjunction between Romantic poetics and Victorian prac-
tice. In "The Study of Poetry" (1880), he claims that for poetry "the idea is
everything." 12 Whereas religion attaches its emotion to fact, "poetry
attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact." Thus Arnold
articulates the idealist view that poetry gives shape to an abstract idea. In
52-