Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

with the stylistic and cultural differences between the modern historicist
poem and its putative model from the past. By contrast, late-twentieth-
century readers have placed greater emphasis on the ideological work of
history, as well as on the importance of identifying what and whose history
is under construction. With the advantage of hindsight, modern diagnoses
of nineteenth-century historicism have contextualized the Victorians'
evident fixation on the past and its reproduction by explaining it in terms
of the radical destabilization of traditional understandings of humanity's
place in history. Such destabilization occurred as people began to examine
the implications of both evolutionary science, as it unfolded from Charles
Lyell to Charles Darwin, and the new historicist biblical scholarship
emanating from Germany, which exposed the unreliability of the gospel
narratives. It has often been suggested that Victorian theories of organic
and teleological historical development were erected to counteract a
disabling sense of cultural dislocation consequential upon such intellectual
developments. That is why the Victorian historicist project might be read,
in Marjorie Levinson's words, as an attempt "to restore to the dead their
own, living language, that they might bespeak themselves." 6 In The Order
of Things - a groundbreaking analysis of the foundations and archaeology
of the human sciences first published in 1966 - Michel Foucault demon-
strates the critical role of history (albeit a history radically reconfigured) in
the Victorians' self-conceptualization, at the very cultural moment when
"man" was "dehistoricized":

[T]he imaginative values then assumed by the past, the whole lyrical halo that

surrounded the consciousness of history at that period, the lively curiosity

shown for documents or for traces left behind by time - all this is a surface

expression of the simple fact that man found himself emptied of history, but

that he was already beginning to recover in the depths of his own being, and

among all the things that were capable of reflecting his image ... a historicity

linked essentially to man himself. 7

By such accounts, nineteenth-century historicism was fraught with internal
tensions and ambiguities. The "lyrical halo" that surrounded historical
consciousness can be reinterpreted in terms of its hollow center. According
to such a view, Victorian writers attempted to resuscitate the past in their
poetry in order to regain access to their own threatened historicity.

II

This viewpoint has interesting implications for our understanding of how
and why poets such as Matthew Arnold and Algernon Charles Swinburne

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