Abstract
What does it mean to praise poems for their “leafiness”? How did the Victorians value bouts-rimés, or “bits of rhyme,” in varying combinations? In this chapter on nineteenth-century sonnet contests and parlor games, Olivia Loksing Moy explores repetitious verses born out of competitive sonnet-writing contests, as practiced by the Hunt-Keats circle and the Rossetti siblings. Moy designates these “bits of rhyme” as verses made special by virtue of their “leafiness”—materially rough around the edges, often rushed, imperfect, and just good enough not to destroy. Preserved in publications such as Leigh Hunt’s Foliage and Christina Rossetti’s novella Maude, such verses were composed in multiples, often presented as sequences of similar items. From London poetry clubs of young gentlemen to the fictional sphere of a girl’s birthday party in a Victorian household, these verses may seem unoriginal—at times even interchangeable; but understood collectively, they serve the important function of enacting sociality and marking social difference, individuating one character from another. This chapter explores the usefulness of the sonnet in everyday life, treating the sonnet as verse. Verse sonnets challenge the poetry-verse divide by recasting the Romantic and Victorian sonnet as poems that were composed in community, not in solitude, and as works marked by similitude and play rather than by solemnity and perfection.
My thanks to Simon Reader and Lee Behlman for their comments and suggested revisions.
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Notes
- 1.
John Gibson Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. VI.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Oct. 1819), 76.
- 2.
These reactions were recorded by Charles Cowden Clarke in “Recollections of Keats by an Old School-Fellow” Atlantic Monthly 7, no. 39 (January 1861), 88.
- 3.
Jeffrey N. Cox, “Leigh Hunt’s Foliage: A Cockney Manifesto,” in Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Routledge, 2003), 62.
- 4.
Hunt’s “On the Nile” is included in Foliage. All three poems, Hunt’s “On the Nile,” Shelley’s “To the Nile,” and Keats’s “The Nile” are included in The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman, Volume 2, 254, 644.
- 5.
Stillinger, Jack. “Keats’s Extempore Effusions and the Question of Intentionality.” In Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 309–10. Cited in Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 66.
- 6.
Joan Coldwell, “Charles Cowden Clarke’s Commonplace Book and Its Relationship to Keats,” Keats Shelley Journal 10 (Winter 1961), 90. Cited in Cox, 66.
- 7.
Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), 103, cited in Cox, Poetry and Politics, 66. Reynolds also wrote a sonnet, “Sweet Poets of the gentile antique line” dated “8 February 1818,” which is followed by Keats’s sonnet, “Blue! – ‘Tis the Life of Heaven,” marked as an “answer” to the previous one. Ibid., 76.
- 8.
Cox, Poetry and Politics, 4. The Zetosophian Society (meaning “I seek wisdom”) was comprised of fourteen men who sought wisdom by workshopping one another’s written work. They were committed to reading and writing one essay per month and providing literary feedback to other members.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Cox, “Leigh Hunt’s Foliage,” 62.
- 11.
Ibid., 74–75.
- 12.
Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- 13.
Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices,” Modern Philology 89 (1992): 323–40. “While such contests, striking the modern reader as dilettantish, can be seen to reduce poetry to a parlor game, I think they suggest instead the deep connection between the verse of the Hunt circle and lived life…” Cox, Poetry and Politics, 65–66.
- 14.
Ibid., 6.
- 15.
Ibid., 7.
- 16.
Compare such poems to, for instance, Keats’ “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” composed as part of a fifteen-minute sonnet contest, which was published as a part of Poems. Hunt republished this six months later in the September 21,1817 Examiner, appending his own sonnet afterwards, and presenting the two sonnets together as “I. From Poems by John Keats” and “II. By Leigh Hunt; Never Before Published.” Here, the paratextual labeling of Keats’ poem serves as an embedded advertisement for the 1817 Poems. Such a juxtaposition has invited scholars such as Duncan Wu to analyze the two poems comparatively and in conjunction. Hunt’s sonnet alone was later printed in Foliage (1818). See Susan Wolfson, John Keats (Longman Pearson, 2007) and Duncan Wu, “Keats and ‘The Cockney School,’” The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge UP: 2001), 46.
- 17.
For Hunt, the subject of “real poetry” is “a delight in rural luxury.” He insists that such luxury is “much more in the reach of every one, and much more beautiful in reality, than people’s fondness for considering all poetry as fiction would imply.” Preface to Foliage, p. 18.
- 18.
“On the Cockney School of Poetry,” 70.
- 19.
Z also criticizes “Mr. Hunt’s Sociality” and his “Love of Sociality.”
- 20.
Ibid., 76.
- 21.
Z continues: “From John Keats the transition is not difficult to John Hamilton Reynolds—for he too had written lines on the story of Rimini—though by nature fit for far other occupation—and accordingly Mr Hunt returns him sonnet for sonnet…” Ibid., 75.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
See Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home, 176.
- 24.
Ilona Dénes, “Parlor Games,” in Encyclopedia of Play in Today’s Society, 2009, 470.
- 25.
Ibid., 471–472.
- 26.
Lee Behlman, “The Case of Light Verse, or Vers de Société,” Victorian Poetry 56, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 477–491.
- 27.
Alexandre Dumas, Bouts-rimés, publiés par Alexandre Dumas (Paris: Librairie du Petit Journal, 1865).
- 28.
Joseph Addison, The Spectator 60 (May 9, 1711), 226.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 82. W.M. Rossetti writes, “Our brother Dante Gabriel and myself were, towards 1848, greatly addicted to writing sonnets together to bouts-rimés; most of my verses published in The Germ—and this remark applies not to sonnets alone—were thus composed. Christina did not do much in the like way; but, being in my company at Brighton in the summer of 1848, she consented to try her hand….After the Brighton days she renewed this exercise hardly at all.” W.M. Rossetti, The Complete Poetical Works of Christina Georgiana Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), 490.
- 31.
Marsh, 84.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid., 103
- 34.
W.M. Rossetti, The Family Letters of Christina Georgiana Rossetti. With some Supplementary Letters and Appendices (London: Brown, Langham & Co., 1908), 8.
- 35.
Rebecca Crump, 211.
- 36.
Kathleen Jones, Learning Not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), 28.
- 37.
Mélody Enjoubault, “‘If You Will Write About it in Rhyme’: Christina Rossetti et L’Exercice du Bout-rimé” Études anglaises 64–3 (2011): 297.
- 38.
Parts of these close readings of Maude have been previously published in The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022). For a full discussion of the Gothic valences of Rossetti’s Maude, see Chapter 2, “The Gothic Poetess: Self-Confinement in the Sonnet Cell.”
- 39.
Rossetti, Maude, 271.
- 40.
Ibid., 270.
- 41.
W.M. Rossetti, The Complete Poetical Works, 490.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid., 271.
- 44.
Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 7, 23, 102.
- 45.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 552.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Gilbert and Gubar, 550, quoted in Showalter, xvi.
- 48.
Enjoubault, 291.
- 49.
Marsh suggests this may possibly be sexual violence or advances from her father. Marsh, 258–259.
- 50.
Marsh, 104–5.
- 51.
Christina Georgiana Rossetti, The Poetical Works of Christina Georgiana Rossetti, with memoir and notes &c by William Michael Rossetti (Macmillan and Co.: London, 1908), 423.
- 52.
See Lee Behlman’s discussion of Karlin on light verse in “The Case of Light Verse, of Vers de Société,” p. 488.
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Moy, O.L. (2023). Nineteenth-Century Sonnet Contests and Parlor Games: “Leafiness” and Bits of Rhyme. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_12
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