Victorian Poetry

THAIS E. MORGAN

Sappho and Apollo produces tragic and lyrical poetry, respectively. Death
ensues for both women. The poetic persona feels and speaks through these
feminine voices what he cannot articulate directly as a man without risking
critical blame for effeminacy. At the same time, the Hellenic paradigm for
prophetic and poetic creativity in "On the Cliffs" is grounded in a
misogynistic homoeroticism: "The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness"
(III, 324) merely serves as a vessel for "the fire eternal" of Apollo, and the
male poet is most inspired when most femininely receptive to a stronger
male force. The speaker ecstatically aspires to the Apollonian poetic
"quire" (III, 314) of which the "strange manlike maiden" (III, 323) Sappho
is an honorary member because she simulates masculinity as a lesbian. In
both "Thalassius" and "On the Cliffs" Swinburne devises metaphor and
revises myth in order to represent a range of Victorian masculinities, from
the hegemonically virile to the dissidently homoerotic. What arises is not so
much contradiction as continuum in the diverse ways that manliness is
portrayed.

Emergent masculinities

This discussion has shown how several unconventional kinds of masculinity
emerge from Tennyson's, Arnold's, and Swinburne's poetry. These male
subjectivities issue from alternatives worked out of dominant and residual
discourses by Tennyson and Arnold as well as the opposition posed to them
by Swinburne. Such "emergent masculinities" tend to be uneven combina-
tions of daringly new and comfortably familiar "meanings and values,"
"significances and experiences" (Williams, "Base and Superstructure," 41).
Emergent masculinities operate within a dialectic of transgression and
containment, as Jonathan Dollimore explains in Sexual Dissidence: Augus-
tine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (1991). The dominant Victorian concepts
of manliness, including self-restraint and superiority to women, are con-
stantly put under pressure from the representation of androgynous mascu-
linities in Tennyson's poetry, feminized masculinities in Arnold's, and
perverse masculinities in Swinburne's. In responding to these alternative
and oppositional stances through a combination of resistance and accom-
modation, the hegemonic view of genders itself gradually shifts throughout
the mid- and late nineteenth century.

An enduring critical controversy centers on Tennyson's extended lyric
sequence, In Memoriam. Dramatic monologue, elegy, and theological
apologia, this text has perplexed readers ever since its publication in 1850:
Does the idealized close friendship between Tennyson and Hallam involve
a proscribed male-male desire? Most Victorian reviewers lauded the poem: