The Spasmodic Poets

Few stories capture the unique interplay of critical theory, mass media and public taste better than the story of the Spasmodics. These earnest, youthful and largely self-educated neo-Romantics hoped to become prophets who would influence literary society on a grand scale. From about 1850 to 1860, the Spasmodics successfully cast a long shadow over virtually every serious discussion of Victorian poetry. Many mid-nineteenth-century writers, including Tennyson, both Brownings and Matthew Arnold, were either adherents or outspoken detractors of the Spasmodic School. This work documents, in appropriate social contexts, the trajectory of the Spasmodic School in both its original incarnation and subsequent appraisals. Examining the various personalities and aesthetic principles that fashioned the movement, the author does not champion any particular critical stance or verdict. The scholarly apparatus cites a number of competing Victorianist interpretations, approaches and judgments with varying degrees of expertise.

Few stories capture the unique interplay of critical theory, mass media and public taste better than the story of the Spasmodics. These earnest, youthful and largely self-educated neo-Romantics hoped to become prophets who would influence literary society on a grand scale. From about 1850 to 1860, the Spasmodics successfully cast a long shadow over virtually every serious discussion of Victorian poetry. Many mid-nineteenth-century writers, including Tennyson, both Brownings and Matthew Arnold, were either adherents or outspoken detractors of the Spasmodic School. This work documents, in appropriate social contexts, the trajectory of the Spasmodic School in both its original incarnation and subsequent appraisals. Examining the various personalities and aesthetic principles that fashioned the movement, the author does not champion any particular critical stance or verdict. The scholarly apparatus cites a number of competing Victorianist interpretations, approaches and judgments with varying degrees of expertise.

This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars that reflect both the diversity of Victorian poetry and the variety of critical approaches that illuminate it. Approaches Victorian poetry by way of genre, production and cultural context, rather than through individual poets or poems Demonstrates how a particular poet or poem emerges from a number of overlapping cultural contexts. Explores the relationships between work by different poets Recalls attention to a considerable body of poetry that has fallen into neglect Essays are informed by recent developments in textual and cultural theory Considers Victorian women poets in every chapter

A work of art written about an artist creating a work of art is, in a sense, a novel in which the author is a character. The essays in this collection examine nineteenth-century texts that attempted to merge fiction and reality into a unified whole.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation argues that the dialectic and dynamic relationship between the periodical review and poetry creates a culture of evaluation which shapes Victorian poetic form. The mediation of poetry by the periodical review orients poets towards public readership and reception, heightening their self-consciousness about their audience and generating a poetics of publicness. Using methodologies associated with historical poetics and new formalism, the book examines the dialogues between poets and periodical reviews from the 1830s to the 1860s. It juxtaposes male and female poets and canonical and uncanonical texts. Challenging the critical binaries of fame and celebrity, the culture of evaluation posits a new way of reading Victorian poetry. It illuminates poets' engagement with the immediacy and inevitability of writing for the present and for the contemporary media through which poetry was read and disseminated. New patterns of reception were created by mass print culture and both poets and reviewers were preoccupied with reaching the newly constituted mass audience. The changes to the material forms of poetry (e.g. through the periodical or gift-book) and the subjection to the commercial imperatives of the literary marketplace encouraged bold experiment with verse. The book identifies three poetic strategies for articulating the preoccupation with a mass audience and the demands of mass media: voice, style and address. Chapters on voice, style, and address explore the development of poetic form in dialogue with periodical reviews.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt about the validity of feeling led to the depiction of the literary heart as alienated, distant, outside the control of mind and will. This coincided with a notable rise in medical literature specifically concerned with the pathological heart, and with the development of new techniques and instruments of investigation such as the stethoscope. As poets feared for the health of their own hearts, their poetry embodies concerns about a widespread culture of heartsickness in both form and content. In addition, concerns about the heart's status and actions reflect upon questions of religious faith and doubt, and feed into issues of gender and nationalism. This book argues that it is vital to understand how this wider culture of the heart informed poetry and was in turn influenced by poetic constructs. Individual chapters on Barrett Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson explore the vital presence of the heart in major works by these poets - including Aurora Leigh, 'Empedocles on Etna', In Memoriam, and Maud - while the wide-ranging opening chapters present an argument for the mutual influence of poetry and physiology in the period and trace the development of new theories of rhythm as organic and affective.

This book explores the ways in which poetic inspiration came to be associated with madness in early nineteenth-century Britain. By examining the works of poets such as Barrett, Browning, Clare, Tennyson, Townshend, and the Spasmodics in relation to the burgeoning asylum system and shifting medical discourses of the period, it investigates the ways in which Britain’s post-Romantic poets understood their own poetic vocations within a cultural context that insistently linked poetic talent with illness and insanity. Joseph Crawford examines the popularity of mesmerism among the writers of the era, as an alternative system of medicine that provided a more sympathetic account of the nature of poetic genius, and investigates the persistent tension, found throughout the literary and medical writings of the period, between the Romantic ideal of the poet as a transcendent visionary genius and the ‘medico-psychological’ conception of poets as mere case studies in abnormal neurological development.

The practice of poetry in the Victorian period was characterised by an extreme diversity of styles, preoccupations and subject-matter. This anthology attempts to draw out some of the main focuses of interest in the Victorian poet. No Victorian poet produced an overall theory of poetry, yet all accepted it as a natural vehicle of expression, and for some subjects, in particular sexuality, the only literary mode. Indeed, the sexual question was made even more acute by the sudden phenomenon of the ‘poetess’, and the relation of poetry to gender raised interesting new critical questions. At the same time, the cultural role of the poet came under increasing debate: Victorian poetry was the first contemporary poetry to be studied. This selection of central texts illustrates these pressures on the Victorian practice of poetry, and the introductory remarks suggest ways in which theory can be related to the understanding key poems themselves.