Victorian Poetry

Experimental form in Victorian poetry

of narration restructures the utterance into a "symptomatic" cultural form,
turning it into an "object of analysis." Victorian poets thus wrote texts that
present utterance as both subject and object. Hence they were able to
experiment with forms that simultaneously represent psychological pro-
cesses (the self as internalized subjectivity) and the phenomenology of a
culture (the self as an externalized manifestation of social practice). It
follows that for Armstrong the Victorian double poem functions as a
skeptical form: "It draws attention to the epistemology which governs the
construction of the self and its relationships and to the cultural conditions
in which those relationships are made." 20 To suggest that epistemological
and hermeneutic problems characterize Victorian poetic forms is again to
allude to "generic indeterminacy" and the consequential problems for
critical interpretation. This approach also focuses a growing awareness in
recent decades about the manner in which Victorian double poems -
especially the dramatic monologue - challenge the epistemological assump-
tions that are so strongly embedded in post-Cartesian idealist traditions. 21
Indeed, the way that many Victorian poems portray expressive desire in
relation to cultural conditions locates ironic displacement within the very
processes of experience, where expressive form and cultural construction
are part of the same utterance.

One of the more obviously innovative poetic forms of the period,
Clough's Amours de Voyage, explores this displacement with subtlety and
finesse. In this work, Clough combines an epistolary method (written in
hexameters) with lyrics and cantos. The letters are written by Claude, an
English visitor to Rome during the French intervention in the Risorgimento
of 1849, to his friend Eustace. The descriptive and expository nature of
these letters, therefore, grounds the poem in specific historical circum-
stances. At the same time, as Claude recounts his experiences in Rome,
including a potential love affair with another English tourist, Mary
Trevellyn, his correspondence becomes a record of a personalized and
intricate introspection. Claude repeats Hamlet's problem, where the
doubts of a skeptical intelligence induce psychological paralysis; he resists
acting upon perceptions and descriptions that seem endlessly problematic,
particularly in the way he articulates them in his letters to Eustace. Hence
in the very act of reporting what he sees of events in Rome, Claude ties
empirical reality to subjectivity and discourse: "there are signs of strag-
glers returning; and voices / Talk" and "on the walls you read the first
bulletin of the morning" (AHC II. 141-43). Signs, readings and bulletins,
an already textualized world, were all he "saw" and knew of "the battle"
(II. 144). Another level of discursive action is added to the poem,
however, by one of its complex structural elements: the separate lyrics, or

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