The critical fortunes of Victorian poetryRomantic, Victorian, and modern - that rather than merely reflecting the
dissociation of fact and value, intellect and emotion, brought about by the
scientific world view, is "an attempt to salvage on science's own empiric
grounds the validity of individual perception against scientific abstrac-
tions." 13 For Langbaum, nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry is linked
by the idea "that the imaginative apprehension gained through immediate
experience is primary and certain, whereas the analytic reflection that
follows is secondary and problematical." 14 Thus poets from both centuries
share a concern about the relations between subjects and objects, the ways
that subjects can know objects, and the question of individual perception.
According to Langbaum, these shared concerns mimic scientists' concerns
with the collection of data through observation and the relation between
that data and the scientific conclusions drawn from it. At the same time,
poets oppose these scientific concerns. Langbaum is less concerned with a
poem's "scientific" content than he is with the new poetic forms that
emerge during the period to explore the new concern with perception. Such
forms include the dramatic lyric and lyric drama in Romanticism, the
Victorian dramatic monologue, and the modernist use of dramatic mono-
logue and symbol. What makes Langbaum's work so interesting, even more
than forty years later, is the way it connects poetic form to larger historical
shifts.
Marxist criticism, however, supplied a critique of some of the liberal
humanist notions underpinning Langbaum's emphasis on a "poetry of
experience." In this regard, Alan Sinfield's Alfred Tennyson (1986) sees
poetry not passively mirroring a historical situation but actively inter-
preting and intervening "from a specific position in the social order." 15
From his standpoint, Victorian poetry is political not only because the
genre, at least through most of the century, had a political role. Sinfield also
claims that "poetry which appears to be remote from political issues is in
fact involved with the political life of its society: it disseminates ideas,
images and narratives of the way the world is, and that is always a political
activity" (n). In addition to reading the poetry in the context of historical
events, Sinfield elucidates how Tennyson's poems help to produce the idea
that poetry has a specific kind of self-contained language that creates the
illusion of "a ground of truth and ultimate being beyond the unstable
constructions of language" (87). He argues that poetry is not just an
example of culture but also contributes to the construction of the idea of
culture itself.
To undertake this task Sinfield makes use of theories about language and
subjectivity derived from two types of post-structuralist theory: deconstruc-
tion and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Associated with the philoso-