Experimental form in Victorian poetryNOTES
1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "To Mary Russell Mitford," 30 December 1844, in
The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley et al., 14 vols. to date
(Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1984-), IX, 304.
2 See, for example, Donald S. Hair, Browning's Experiments with Genre
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); and F.E.L. Priestley, Language
and Structure in Tennyson's Poetry (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973).
3 Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Criticism and Culture: The Role of
Critique in Modern Literary Theory (Harlow: Longman, 1991), 23-25. For
further discussion, see E. Warwick Slinn, "Poetry and Culture: Performativity
and Critique," New Literary History 30 (1999), 57-74.
4 This connection was pointed out to me by Herbert F. Tucker somewhere in the
Buller Gorge, New Zealand, on 27 January 1998. See also The Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary.
5 Quotations from Arthur Hugh Clough's poetry are taken from Clough, Amours
de Voyage, ed. Patrick Scott (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1974);
line references appear in parentheses.
6 See William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook, second edition (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), 229.
7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My
Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols. Bollingen
Series (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, 13.
8 Coleridge, Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (New
York: Capricorn, 1959), 68.
9 On the interpenetration of space and time in Victorian poetry, see Herbert F.
Tucker, "Of Monuments and Moments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-Century
Poetry," Modern Language Quarterly 58 (1997), 269-97.
10 Coleridge, Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, 67.
11 See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the
Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947).
12 Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry," in Arnold, English Literature and Irish
Politics, ed. R.H. Super, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11
vols. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77), IX, 161.
13 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing; or, Confidence in Opinions.
Manifested in a Discourse on the Shortness and Uncertainty of Our Knowledge,
and Its Causes; with Some Reflexions on Peripateticism; and an Apology for
Philosophy (London: H. Eversden, 1661), 196.
14 See, for example, A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of
Matthew Arnold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 189-93, and
George Bornstein, Poetic Remaking: The Art of Browning, Yeats, and Pound
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 44-45. David
G. Riede recognizes that the poem provides no resolution, noting that adverse
judgments about its aesthetic failure are based on expectations about organic
unity, and concluding instead that the poem's "inability to resolve a dialectic is a
proper and inevitable reflection of a godless society in which no goal can be
posited and no quest is possible": Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of
Language (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 147.
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