Victorian Poetry

The critical fortunes of Victorian poetry

experiences the ideal subject matter of poetry. But the full impact of the
recovery of women poets on the canon of Victorian poetry is only now
beginning to be felt in the anthologies that incorporate the work of both
men and women poets. When they predominate, the idea that women poets
are an extra, an interesting supplement to the study of "real" Victorian
poetry for those who are interested in that sort of thing, will disappear.
This brings me to my final point. The Victorians posed the central
questions of their time through the language of gender and sexuality. They
structured gender and sexuality around binary oppositions - masculine/
feminine, angel/whore, heterosexual/homosexual, normal/perverse - and
they used these oppositions to pose the problem of binary thinking itself, in
a variety of venues. To some extent, of course, we do the same thing today.
And yet today these categories are coming to seem increasingly archaic: to
call upon them is to call upon the past, to use them is to reinscribe a
Victorian world on a contemporary one. Studying how the Victorians
created a world structured by these categories might help us to imagine
what it might mean to think beyond them.

NOTES

This essay is made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in
the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
Thanks are also due to Joseph Bristow for his advice and suggestions.
1 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1932), Third Edition (London: Faber and Faber,
1951), 287.
2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovano-
vich, 1929), 14-15.
3 "Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer,"
Virginia Woolf writes in "Professions for Women" (1931), in Woolf, Collected
Essays, 4 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), II, 286.
4 For more on the development of English Studies in the United Kingdom and
United States respectively, see Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London:
Routledge, 1989) and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional
History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
5 For various recent versions of this story see George Levine, "Victorian Studies,"
in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American
Literary Studies, eds. Steven Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA,
1992), 130-53, Gerhard Joseph, "Why Are They Saying Such Bad Things about
Victorian Poetry? Recent Tennyson Criticism," Victorian Studies 38 (1995),
255-64, and Thai's E. Morgan, "Theorizing Victorian Poetry: An Introduction,"
Victorian Poetry 29 (1991), 329-32.
6 In the 1832 version of the poem, Lancelot does not appear in the final stanza;
instead the "well-fed wits" of Camelot gather around the boat to read the
puzzling piece of parchment on the Lady's breast: "The web was woven

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