E. WARWICK SLINNsong), the extent to which the speaker's expression is reactive means that
external causes (social conditions, social events) cannot be ignored either.
Rather, in Maud cultural determination, subjective responsibility, and
cosmic purpose all become intermingled within imagistic and rhetorical
connections.
Finally, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Browning's The Ring and
the Book (1868-69), poems by the wife and husband poets, offer what
remain arguably the most ambitious literary experiments in the period.
Aurora Leigh - the result of Barrett Browning's desire to write a new form
with which I began - is a verse novel that features the autobiography of a
woman poet. Its combination of genres (autobiography, dialogue, narra-
tive, prophecy, satire, treatise) comprises an attempt to write a modern epic
where the protagonist's mythic quest becomes regendered and historicized
as the desire of a woman poet to achieve both artistic and personal
fulfillment within contemporary Victorian society. As the poem theorizes
its own production (Aurora's famous reflection on poetry in Book V), the
dominating aesthetic question is how to combine conflicting domains of
experience: the external boisterous age which "brawls, cheats, maddens,
calculates, aspires" (EBBAL V. 204) and the internal stage of "the soul
itself, / Its shifting fancies and celestial lights" (V. 340-41). Aurora's
answer to that question ("What form is best for poems?" [V. 223]) might be
taken from Coleridgean poetics: "Trust the spirit, / As sovran nature does,
to make the form /... Inward evermore / To outward" (V. 224-8). In the
Fifth Book, Barrett Browning appears to follow this dictate by shifting
from retrospective (inward) narration, where Aurora is in control of her
narrative, to the unfolding of (outward) events as they happen. From this
book onward, Aurora's narration resembles journal entries that have been
recorded daily where we see once again the ambiguous narrative formalism
of a poem like "Childe Roland" with its past-tense account told from a
present-tense perspective.
The aesthetic trick, however, is to combine the poem's formalist method
with the protagonist's personal dilemma, since Aurora realizes in Book V
that her personal success as a poet has left her socially isolated. While her
reading public appropriates her work, using her poems to represent their
own feelings of love and joy, she remains solitary and loveless (see V.
439-77). The alteration in mode from retrospective narrative to journal
writing thus registers Aurora's own transformation from the controlled and
known world of her autobiographically constructed childhood and youth
to the less secure exigencies of fate and social action. The later books
consequently focus more and more on dialogue, as a dialectic of internal
and external discourses shapes Aurora's experiences. This dialectic has
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