KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADESculture, by which he means its desire for money and commodities, its
valorization of a scientific world view, and its loss of faith. For both critics,
the later Victorian poets are preferable to Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold
because these earlier writers tried to engage with and comment on a culture
not worth engaging with. Heath-Stubbs asserts that a poem like "The Lady
of Shalott" gives "the most complete artistic satisfaction" insofar as it is
"purely decorative." By this he means that the poem gives "satisfaction"
because it does not comment on contemporary society but creates a
beautiful alternative to that ugly reality, like "paintings in words or pieces
of lovely tapestry." 9 Yet when Tennyson tries to deal with social problems
in his monodrama Maud (1855), featuring a crazed speaker betrayed in
love and agitated by the tumult of the Crimean War, the poet's "reaction is
scarcely adult, and his final refuge is in a hysterical jingoism." 10
It is Johnson, however, who argues most strongly for the complexity of
Victorian poetry, for the doubleness that results from poets like Tennyson,
Browning, and Arnold being torn between private vision and public
responsibility. Unlike earlier critics who saw these poets as merely surren-
dering to the demands of their readership, Johnson saw them combating
the prevalent values of the age, concealing within public poems their true
private insights. Johnson identifies a doubleness in Victorian poetry that
critics interested in the relations between poetry and society still comment
on today: "The expressed content has a dark companion, its imaginative
counterpart, which accompanies and comments on apparent meaning in
such a way as to suggest ulterior motives." 11 This doubleness springs from
the Victorian poets' shared desire to be true to their own imaginative
vision, and yet to engage a wide audience in such a way as to have an
impact on social life. In Johnson's view, this remains an impossible project.
From his perspective, what is valuable about art in modern society is its
opposition to status quo, its "alien vision": the insights that come from its
separation from popular values and ideas. Johnson reads "The Lady of
Shalott" as a poem about how the life of the imagination can be destroyed
by the desire to enter into a more public, actual life. The Lady's web and
mirror stand as "metaphors for the creative imagination which has been
shattered by the intrusion of direct experience." 12 In the private insights
concealed in poems that on the surface might seem bland and complacent,
Victorian poets take up thoroughly modern concerns.
With Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (1957), we move
beyond the question of whether Victorian poets were too involved or too
uninvolved with their society, and toward a more complex conception of
the relationship between poetic form and historical events. The phrase
"poetry of experience" describes poetry of the post-Enlightenment period -
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