[Download] "General Materials (Guide to the Year's Work)" by Victorian Poetry * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: General Materials (Guide to the Year's Work)
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 168 KB
Description
Erik Gray's elegant and evocative new study, Milton and the Victorians (Cornell Univ. Press, 2009) takes up the question of Milton's influence in the wake of the Romantic agon diagnosed by Harold Bloom. Paying closest attention to Christina Rossetti, Arnold, Tennyson, and George Eliot, Gray offers variations on a double theme: the obvious yet diffuse nature of the Miltonic in Victorian writing and the roots of this model of influence in the work of Milton himself. Unlike the Romantics who struggle insistently and Satanically with Milton as their precursor, the Victorians accept him as a "classic"--meaning he is both everywhere, taken for granted, and yet strangely obscure, occluded in ways that nevertheless express his power as an influence. Christina Rossetti's biblical allusions, for example, keep turning to Milton in a way that quietly demonstrates the pervasiveness of his poetry. In the central portion of the book, Gray chooses a particular rubric for individual authors. Arnold is drawn to "the Might of Weakness" in Milton: the tendency for power to get expressed paradoxically through retreat or self-limitation. This provides a model for Arnold's own poetry and its frequent yet oblique allusions to Milton. Similarly, Tennyson adopts Miltonic modes of "Diffusive Power," limiting his scope, trading in understatement, and emphasizing the earthly, mortal beauty in Milton rather than the sublime. George Eliot thematizes "Troubled Transmissions" in Middlemarch, drawing on David Masson's then-recent biography to invoke a Milton both great and "subject to inevitable distortion" (p. 151). Each section of Gray's book leads into a series of readings of related texts, brought to life by the critic's fine ear and sure touch, his real ease with language and perhaps more crucially, with the more subtle range of human emotion. His previous book, The Poetry of Indifference, was also devoted to the understated and the oblique, yet his own habits of mind are anything but slack. In a characteristically witty move, Gray entitles his new book's conclusion, "The Heirs of Milton," and it dwells tellingly, amusingly, and finally movingly on Milton's hair-and human hair generally--as a way of thinking about influence via self-possession and dispersal. Readers may not accept all of Gray's suggestive formulations, but they cannot fail to be impressed by his nuanced mode of proceeding and the winning style of his prose. Milton and the Victorians provides valuable new ways of thinking about Milton, about the relationship of Romantic to Victorian literature, about the specific authors and works it takes up, and about the nature of influence itself. It reveals an impressive literary critic at work. In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Ohio Univ. Press, 2009), Jason Rudy asks us to re-imagine the history of Victorian poetry by placing the Spasmodics at its center. In such a narrative, the prosodic experiments of Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith represent an extreme version of what motivated Victorian poets across the board: the struggle to forge a "rhythmic epistemology," involving "the communication of knowledge and feeling through physiological pulses" conveyed via the reading of verse (p. 80). Using the debates over Spasmody as a lens, Rudy reveals patterns of engagement with "embodied poetic form" as characteristic of the age of electricity and the telegraph. He argues that while the poets of Sensibility (for example, the Della Cruscans) and the Romantics had some allegiance to the idea of electric communication of emotion, it was the Victorians who moved beyond mere intellectual processing and metaphorical deployment: they wanted verse to work directly upon the body. One might argue with the quick dispatch of Romanticism along these lines, particularly the sidelining of Coleridge, but Rudy is looking ahead to Tennyson's early work, and particularly The Princess, as involved with the telegraph and the physiological effects of elect