I admit I know little about poetry, and probably even less about Victorian poets. When I started discussing the possibility of a Victorian Poets event at Bryant Park with Justin Tackett, I realized that one of my favorite poets was actually a Victorian poet. Below Justin gives a little taste of what he’ll discuss in Bryant Park on July 19th, 12:30pm in the Reading Room (see details below). –Purdy, @purdyoxford
Some thoughts on poetry, prosody, and Gerard Manley Hopkins
By Justin Tackett
Magdalen College, Oxford University
and Stanford University
“One distinction of Victorian poetry is the degree to which serious work and popular culture converged, as evidenced by snippets of poems now proverbial,” Linda K. Hughes notes in her recent introduction to the topic in the Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry. Indeed,
Alfred Tennyson’s “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,”
Robert Browning’s “God’s in his heaven — / All’s right with the world!” and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”
remain part of our colloquial repertoire. But Hughes adds another observation that seems to speak more deeply to our current age.
“The best Victorian poetry is complex, challenging, and experimental,” Hughes says, and it enjoyed a wide readership as part of “the first era of mass media.” As literacy increased and printing technology advanced, the Victorians witnessed a media explosion during which more books, journals, magazines, and newspapers were published and read than ever before. The Victorian period, in this sense, was a forerunner to the Information Age, and much of the excitement, empowerment, bewilderment, and concern they felt as a result of revolutions in communication resembles our own.
Poetry, as ever, had its part to play in transforming how people communicated and expressed themselves. Victorian poets explored the political, social, and technological aspects of their rapidly changing environs. More specifically, poets experimented with elements of prosody, among other pursuits, as a means both of entrenching themselves in the past and moving beyond it. They deployed diverse forms of meter, rhythm, rhyme, and sonic patterning, and explored the classical, Anglo-Saxon, gendered, local and national aspects of their culture and language as they viewed and understood them.
Victorian prosody (and prosody in general) can and should be seen as situated in time and space — as historical — just as the content of poetry often is. As Meredith Martin, a professor of Victorian and modernist poetry at Princeton, and Yisrael Levin put it in “Victorian Prosody: Measuring the Field,” “[W]e might describe historical prosody as an awareness that forms might mean different things at different historical moments.” Many nineteenth-century poets were particularly engaged in speaking to and through prosody as an historical discourse.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic convert and priest, was one such poet. Hopkins managed to publis