Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

But what are our responsibilities to the text of the past? Gillian Beer
points out: "Engaging with the difference of the past in our present makes
us aware of the trajectory of our arrival and of the insouciance of the past -
their neglectfulness of our prized positions and our assumptions." 52
Attending respectfully to that difference, looking at the Victorians' own
strategies for positioning themselves in history, can perhaps enable us to
confront our own historicity under post-modernity with greater wisdom
and equanimity, mindful of Tennyson's Ulysses who perceives that "all
experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose
margin fades / For ever and for ever" (19-21).

NOTES

1 Thomas Love Peacock, "The Four Ages of Poetry," in Peacock, Essays,

Memoirs, Letters, and Unfinished Novels, The Works of Thomas Love

Peacock, 10 vols. (London: Constable, 1924), VIII, 20; further page references

appear in parentheses. Arnold develops his ideas about the cultural role of the

poet and intellectual in an uncivilized society ruled by "Barbarians" (the

aristocracy) and "Philistines" (the middle classes) in Culture and Anarchy: An

Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869): see Culture and Anarchy with

Friendship's Garland and Some Literary Essays, ed. R.H. Super, The Complete

Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of

Michigan Press, 1960-77), V, 85-256.

2 A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1986), viii.

3 On the professionalization of history, see J.P. Kenyon, The History Men: The

Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson, 1983).

4 John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press, 1942), 1. Mill's essay originally appeared in parts in the Examiner

between 23 January 1831 and 29 May 1831.

5 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, centenary

edition, 30 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99), V, 38.

6 Marjorie Levinson, "The New Historicism: Back to the Future," in Rethinking

Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, Levinson, Marilyn Butler,

Jerome McGann, and Paul Hamilton, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 52.

7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,

trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), 369.

8 Algernon Charles Swinburne, "To Pauline Trevelyan," 15 March 1865, The

Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, i960), I, 115.

9 Arnold described his own age as "[not] unprofound, not ungrand, not

unmoving: - but unpoetical": "To Arthur Hugh Clough," February 1849, in The

Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 2 vols. to date (Charlottesville,

VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996-), I, 131.

10 Foucault, The Order of Things, 368.

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