Abstract
The status of verse as a minor partner in poetry’s nobler enterprise is as generally untheorized in principle as it is as widely acknowledged in practice—and for reasons stemming from a certain ambivalence, which we still share with the Victorians, about the formal poetic medium itself. Poetry nowhere exposes this ambivalence more clearly than when flaunting its dependency on verse’s material mediation. Victorian poems written for, or as, inscription (W. Morris, R. Browning, W. M. Praed); poems deriving their titles from such structural ingredients as stanzas or lines (Browning, M. Arnold); poems that feature or elicit the perusal of verse by paralexic means (C. Rossetti, A. Tennyson): poems like these can, by the very candor of their formal concession, vex the distinction between mere verse and the higher poetry that was supposed to transcend it.
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Notes
- 1.
Behlman, “Light Verse,” 477.
- 2.
Mill, Literary Essays, 49–63.
- 3.
Bentham, Rationale, 206–207.
- 4.
The distinction at issue here focusses Steele’s learned third chapter, “The Reverses of Time: The Origin and History of the Distinction between Verse and Poetry”; see especially pp. 109–111 and 149–166.
- 5.
Russell, Principles, pp. 101ff.
- 6.
Williams, “Jokes in the Machine,” 819–820.
- 7.
Morris, Choice, 158.
- 8.
Daniel, “Defence,” in Essays, vol. 2, p. 359.
- 9.
See, for example, the 1872 lyric “Amphibian”: “We substitute, in a fashion, / For heaven—poetry” (55–56), in Browning, The Poems, ed. Pettigrew and Collins, vol. 2, p. 7. Except where otherwise indicated, all subsequent Browning citations are to this edition.
- 10.
Arnold, Complete Poems, 609. All subsequent Arnold citations are to this edition.
- 11.
Auden, Light Verse, xvii.
- 12.
Ferry, Title, 155–160.
- 13.
Behlman, “Light Verse,” 478; Williams, “Jokes in the Machine,” 823; Steele, Missing Measures, 160–161.
- 14.
See Stauffer’s monograph Book Traces and his “Book Traces” database: https://booktraces.lib.virginia.edu/.
- 15.
Browning, The Ring and the Book, 4 (book 1, line 33).
- 16.
Praed, Poems, vol. 1, p. 406. Subsequent Praed citations are to this edition.
- 17.
See Auden, Light Verse, xviii; Behlman, “Light Verse,” 484.
- 18.
Rossetti, Complete Poems, vol. 1, p. 170.
- 19.
Karlin, Victorian Verse, xlii.
- 20.
Karlin, Victorian Verse, lxii.
- 21.
Tennyson, In Memoriam, 53 (lyric 77, lines 1–3).
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Tucker, H.F. (2023). The Matter with Verse: What Victorian Poetry Wasn’t, and Was. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_2
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