Poetics En Passant: Redefining the Relationship Between Victorian and Modern Poetry

265 Pages·2009·2.086 MB·English

by  Anne Jamison (auth.)

P
OETICS EN PASSANT
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers
and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed
what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and
shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed.
Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike,
literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels,
reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incompara-
ble in Western history. Nineteenth-Century
Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly stud-
ies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the char-
acter of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus
Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie,
Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot,
Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series
editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at
Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial
Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor
of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of
The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes edi-
tions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British
Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE:
Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter
Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis
Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk
Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore
Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by
Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison
FORTHCOMING TITLES:
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele
Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer
From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood
Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson
Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner
Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt
Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett
Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab
Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian
The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson
P
OETICS EN PASSANT
R R
EDEFINING THE ELATIONSHIP
B V
ETWEEN ICTORIAN AND
M P
ODERN OETRY
Anne Jamison
POETICS EN PASSANT
Copyright © Anne Jamison, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61899-2
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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ISBN 978-1-349-38170-8 ISBN 978-0-230-10125-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230101258
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jamison, Anne Elizabeth, 1969–
Poetics en passant : redefining the relationship between Victorian
and modern poetry / Anne Jamison.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-349-38170-8 (alk. paper)
1. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830–1894—Criticism and
interpretation. 2. Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 1830–1894—Technique.
3. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Criticism and interpretation.
4. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Technique. 5. Poetics—History—
19th century. 6. Poetry, Modern—19th century—History and criticism.
I. Title.
PR5238.J36 2009
821(cid:2).8—dc22 2009006231
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: November 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my wonderful family
and also
C. H. P.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Any Where Out of This Verse: Baudelaire’s Prose
Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression 19
2 “Prose Combat”: Baudelaire and The Press 53
3 The “Victorian Baudelaire” 89
4 Passing Strange: Christina Rossetti’s Unusual Dead 123
5 Goblin Metrics 145
6 “When I am dead, my dearest . . .”: Modernism
Remembers and Forgets Rossetti 179
Coda 215
Notes 221
General Index 245
Index to Individual Works 259
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A
n earlier version of chapter 1, “Any Where Out of this Verse:
Baudelaire’s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression,”
appeared in NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH STUDIES 29.3
and 4 (spring/summer 2001) and is reprinted with permission of
the University of Nebraska Press. A version of chapter 4, “Passing
Strange: Christina Rossetti’s Unusual Dead,” appeared in Textual
Practice 20.2 (2006). Material from chapter 3 appeared, in very dif-
ferent form, in Browning Society Notes 29 (2009) as part of confer-
ence proceedings from “La Prude Angleterre: Victorians and France,
Cultural Cross-Currents in the Nineteenth Century,” organized by
University College, London, and the Browning Society. Many thanks
to Berry Chevasco for organizing such a productive conference.
A brief review essay on material discussed in chapter 6, “When I am
dead my d earest . . . : Modernism Remembers and Forgets Rossetti”
appeared with the same title as an “alert” in How2 2.1 (2003). All
translations are my own except where otherwise noted.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of teachers and colleagues
at Princeton University, especially that of Claudia Brodsky, Stanley
Corngold, and Michael Wood. Suzanne Nash, U. C. Knopflmacher,
and Elaine Showalter provided invaluable early advice and help, as did
long conversations about poetry with Evgeni Pavlov, Dan Blanton,
Soelve Curdts, and Amy Billone, whose friendship and extraordi-
nary sensitivity to poetry often sustained me. April Alliston was more
instrumental than she knows, and Oliver Arnold, Eileen Reeves, and
Cornel West all provided inspiration at key moments. I would also like
to acknowledge research and travel support from the Department of
Comparative Literature, the Department of English, and the Graduate
School, without which my work at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris
would not have been possible.
I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues at the University
of Utah, especially Disa Gambera, Paisley Rekdal, Maeera Schreiber,
Tom Stillinger, and Barry Weller for their careful reading and many
wonderful conversations about poetry; Barry has worked hard enough
to deserve a second salary. At a crucial juncture, Tom also performed