E. WARWICK SLINNbracketed." 16 The result, he claims, is "generic indeterminacy." 17 By this
term, Shaw identifies two tendencies. First, he means forms where the main
subject of the poem remains elusive: Is "The Scholar-Gipsy" a narrative
about the gypsy, a disrupted dream-vision, a lyrical expression of loss and
regret, a satirical critique of social ennui, or a dramatization of a cultural
impasse? Second, he distinguishes a "radical failure" to satisfy expectations:
"The Scholar-Gipsy" begins as a pastoral idyll but does not end as one. In a
similar vein, George Bornstein focuses on a distinction between the Greater
Romantic Lyric and the Greater Victorian Lyric. Where the Romantic Lyric
rests upon a shifting relationship between speaker and nature, the Victorian
Lyric emphasizes linguistic self-consciousness and textual defensiveness.
Both forms, however, manifest a tension between visionary and ordinary
experience. This tension, Bornstein claims, provokes a potential for self-
division, one that "the Romantics tend to mitigate and the Victorians to
exacerbate." 18
An obvious example of this exacerbation is always provided by Tenny-
son's "The Two Voices" (1842). But the ultimate Victorian experiment with
self-division is arguably Clough's Dipsychus (1865). This poem, arranged
into various scenes and couched in various verse forms, is written as a
dialogue between a pragmatic tempter and a naive idealist. The dialectical
interplay in this contest offers a subtle exploration of the multiplying
divisions of consciousness and of its inconstant relationships with external
phenomena and cultural ideologies - phenomena and ideologies that may
or may not be the consequence of the speaking subject's self-projections.
Exacerbation of the potential for division sustains Isobel Armstrong's
remarkable analysis of what she calls the Victorian double poem: a poem in
which the Victorian poet dramatizes and objectifies the simultaneous
existence of unified selfhood and fracturing self-awareness. Her crucial
point is that this doubleness is structural, built into the basic processes of
the poem. In this respect, it formalizes the link between poetry and culture,
both testing the systematic ambiguities of language and drawing attention
to "the nature of words as a medium of representation." 19 The result is
consistent with Shaw's theory of "generic indeterminacy," where lyrics, for
instance, become reclassified as drama. In other words, a poem that
presents itself as lyric expression turns that expression around so that the
utterance itself, as well as representing the speaker's outpouring of personal
feeling, becomes the object of analysis and critique. Bearing this point in
mind, Armstrong gives the example of Tennyson's "Mariana," where the
speaker's account of her tortured isolation is "the utterance of a subjective
psychological condition." At the same time, the poem incorporates the
narrative overtones of a ballad into its lyrical expressiveness so that the act
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