The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) is recognised as the crowning achievement of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. In 1921, a copy of this book housed in the State Library of New South Wales was beautifully rebound in tooled kangaroo hide. In the process of attempting to transform the Kelmscott Chaucer into an Australian cultural artefact, this act of rebinding illuminates Australian medievalism, the philosophy of the Kelmscott Press (which tends to hybridise the medieval and the modern), Chaucer’s depiction of materiality and surface in the Canterbury Tales, and the relationship between colonial and long-standing Indigenous Australian uses of kangaroo skin.

Drawing on sociologist Tim Ingold and theologian Norman Wirzba, this chapter in Christian Environmentalism and Human Responsibility in the 21st Century discusses how Alice Meynell (1847-1922) pursues an integrated theology-ecology in her poetry by envisioning the created world as a meshwork held together by Christ. Meynell considers the incarnated, crucified, and yet living Christ as continuing to inhabit or wait within or walk among the grain, grass, grapes and galaxies of the world, devoted to their particularity. Christ’s wayfaring among the elements of the world and his way-of-being for them marks the world, such that each element also has a particular way of being and becoming. Included in this tropos is any person -- but especially the poet -- who goes as a wayfarer among things and not as a traveler past objects. Such a poet, attuned to the spiritual topography of creation, also wayfares through language toward the surprise often lurking in the ordinary.

Dominique Gracia and Fergus McGhee's essay introduces their co-edited issue of Victorian Poetry on the topic of Re-Encounter, featuring some fantastic articles on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, L.E.L., Edwin Arnold, Augusta Webster, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and decadent peacocks. The issue focuses on re-encounter as a specific sort of C19 experience, distinguished from other varieties of repetition by its grounding in first-person experience and a self-conscious temporal relation to past and prospective engagements with the same object (person, place, thing, idea, or text).

Spiritualist theology describes heaven as a Swedenborgian series of ascending spheres, each one progressing toward perfection. Surprisingly central to this theology is the figure of the "spirit-born" (stillborn, miscarried, or aborted) child. If denied earthly development, infants were believed to develop and progress in the afterlife, and depictions of the Summerland offered consolation to grieving parents by describing the nurseries and schools in which the spirits of infants are raised. Spiritualists even designed earthly schools modeled on visions of education in the Summerland. Yet the spirits of infants who communicated with spiritualists often sent messages that challenged Victorian beliefs about maternity and parentage. Infants in the Summerland raise important questions about what it means to be born and unborn – questions that shaped Victorian ideas about reproductive rights.

In his essay “Paul Verlaine”, published in the National Review in 1892, Arthur Symons (1865-1945) describes Verlaine’s poetry as “an act of impressionism”, and he compares Verlaine’s poetic technique in this context to a Whistler painting (501). The following year, in “The Decadent Movement in Literature”, Symons points to Verlaine as an “ideal of Decadence”, explaining that in his poetry, Verlaine manages to “fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul” (862). Through the trope of the disembodied poetic voice, Symons suggests, Verlaine expresses the complicated and conflicting rhythms of his own life and, therefore, Verlaine “has been constant only to himself, to his own self-contradictions” (860). However, through the trope of the disembodied voice, Verlaine at the same time gestures inclusively toward readers, thereby suggesting the pertinence of his context to humankind in general. In 1899, in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Symons added another dimension to the sensory appeal of Verlaine, suggesting that “there are poems of Verlaine which go as far as verse can go to become pure music, the note of a bird with a human soul” (215). In this essay, I examine the ways in which Symons and John Addington Symonds (1840-1894) manipulate Verlaine’s trope of the disembodied voice that speaks through nuance and suggestiveness: they employ a very specific disembodied voice, that of the Virgin Mary, in autobiographical poetry written in the transitional culture of late-nineteenth-century Catholic decadence.

Introduction to a special issue of on "Victorian Poetry and the Victorian Salon."

Lear frequently sang for small social gatherings, his preferred material being his own interpretations of the Tennyson poems he loved. Lear had a great deal of company in setting Tennyson's words to music, but he was among the few whose efforts met with the latter's approval. According to the poet's grandson, "Lear's were the only settings of his poems that Alfred liked—'they seem to throw a diaphanous veil over the words—nothing more,' he would say." This article builds on the historical testimony of this authorial approval, aiming to illuminate what Lear and Tennyson understood to be the vital qualities of the latter's lines—qualities that could be especially well preserved in intimate musical performance.

What happens when the visual subject of ekphrastic writing is itself a representation of music – music as it is made and heard by the figures in a picture? In the six sonnets considered in this essay, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – himself an artist as well as a poet – doubles the ekphrastic action to summon an elusive music from what is offered to the eye alone. The poems on the page, in these examples, explore both the promise and the limits of poetry’s long association with song. They participate in shared Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic efforts to conjure an experience of music from the resistant genres of painting and poetry, desiring (and regretting) a lost time when poetry and music were regarded as one. But Rossetti’s sonnets are less interested in evoking the sounds of music than in exploring in poetic form what music means – how it affects the mind through multiple senses and the emotions, how its harmonic and rhythmic structures shape those responses in time, and what a modern poetry might learn from a kinship with music. Music in these poems appears as a special kind of embodied knowing, one whose meanings can – perhaps – be conveyed by the different representational means and formal structures of a picture or a poem. What Rossetti’s ekphrastic sonnets on music offer, I suggest, is less a music that can be heard than a form of melopoetics: a literary-musical criticism.

This essay performs a case study of two poems, Arthur Symons’s ‘Javanese Dancers’ (1892), and its twin, Sarojinin Naidu’s ‘Eastern Dancers’ (1896), in order to show how the dynamics of mastery and submission, the colonizer and the colonized, and the white self and the Other, play themselves out through a seemingly apolitical trope: the dance. It argues that these poems, in addition to a set of historical materials, suggest that the pure and universal perspective embedded in Symbolism’s founding theories is a fallacy. In Symons’s poetry, the disembodied voice of Symbolism is not the voice of the ‘human’ soul so much as the voice of a white soul that draws correspondences between white women and life, while associating non-white women with death. Four years later, Naidu’s poem tries to address Symbolism’s inability to sufficiently engage with Otherness by stressing the Other’s vitality at every moment. Yet this comes at a cost – one that rests on whether we read the poem’s vivid, sensual language as a sign of liveliness, exoticization, or queer desire.

Close analysis of William Morris’s “Riding Together” demonstrates that this poem’s treatment of narrative and character permits it to navigate between what Victorians saw as male- and female-coded poetic strategies—thus positioning it at a crux of nineteenth-century anxiety about the Pre-Raphaelites—and that its depiction of intimate comradeship serves to reconcile divergent versions of manliness. This essay first shows how the formal features of "Riding Together" shape its approach to portraying plotted selfhood, which is then connected to gender politics. Next, Morris's Chants for Socialists provides a fresh vantage point on his representation of masculinity in the Defence of Guenevere. Overall, an extensive new reading of the understudied “Riding Together" reveals that gendered perspectives on Pre-Raphaelitism can illuminate the cultural position of Victorian verse.

The great Persian lyric poet Hafiz was first translated into English by Sir William Jones in the 1780s. In the course of the nineteenth century many further translations would appear, initially intended for the use of oriental scholars and students of the Persian language, but increasingly also for the general reading public. The paraphrasers or ‘popularizers’ who devised the latter category of translation competed with professional scholars to shape the dissemination and popular perception of Persian poetry. Owing to a variety of factors, the middle of the nineteenth century saw a marked decline in the number of new Hafiz translations, and it is not until 1891 that a complete edition of Hafiz's works finally appeared in English. This led to an unusual situation, particular to Britain, in which scholars (Edward H. Palmer, Henry Wilberforce-Clarke, Gertrude Bell), and popularizers (Richard Burton, Herman Bicknell, Justin McCarthy, Richard Le Gallienne, John Payne) all jostled to fill the vacuum created by the absence of a definitive version. Their competition created, in short order, a diversity of versions presented to consumers, which allowed Hafiz's influence to be felt in twentieth-century poetry untrammelled by the impress (as became the case with Omar Khayyam) of one dominant translator. While the refraction of Hafiz through the biases and predispositions of multiple translators has been regarded as hopelessly distorting by Julie Scott Meisami, I argue instead that it highlights lyric, in the richness and diversity characteristic of Hafiz, as the Persian poetic mode which has been more influential on English writing and yet the most difficult to categorize and integrate. Lastly, by paying heed to the popular transmission of Hafiz in English, we might better understand the reception of Persian poetry in its generic, rather than only its formal character.

Christina Rossetti's poetry, so interested in human relationships to cycles of ripeness and decay, suggests an intriguing concern with what it means to waste: to waste time, to waste space, and to waste resources. Equally important to her poetry is the related question of what it means to be wasted. This paper explores figures of botanical, agricultural, and ecological waste by attending to a question loosely rooted in ecofeminist debate: what happens when women's bodies are troped as a natural resource? Early in the Rossetti renaissance, Antony H. Harrison noted that "images of the harvest predominate [in her poetry], suggesting that one reaps what one sows" (122). But what happens when you are what is sown, what is reaped? In Rossetti's depictions of fruitlessness and waste, we can glimpse a surprising degree of resistance to familiar associations of female corporeality with nature.

This essay examines the narrated recollections of the spy in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s unfinished poem “A soliloquy of one of the spies left in the wilderness” (1863). Particular attention is paid to the spy’s account of the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings and slavery in Egypt in order to examine Hopkins’s depiction of a will in rebellion against God. After considering the poem’s relationship to Hopkins’s undergraduate years in light of his imminent conversion to Catholicism, the essay investigates the ways in which the soliloquy’s confused chronologies and emendations call attention to the spy’s spiritual disorders. By reading the spy’s internal disorder as a corollary to the social disintegration in Eden that Hopkins identified in Adam and Eve’s rebellion, the essay argues that the soliloquy attributes the speaker’s inner disorientation to his rebellious will set against God. Although the soliloquy appropriates descriptions of the lush Canaanite landscape to describe Egyptian slavery as comfortable, even luxurious, the vestiges of violence repeatedly interrupt the soliloquy’s relentless insistence on Egypt’s “pleasance.” As the soliloquy’s rhetorical maneuvers repeatedly fail to justify the spy’s rebellion, Hopkins explores and displays the impact of spiritual rebellion on the human psyche.

The conception of animal sounds as meaningless and automatic is often held to come from Cartesian philosophy, while animal speech in contrast is viewed as a poetic invention. This paper argues that the entire debate unfolds on ground defined by poetry. With reference to works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Clare, and Tennyson, the paper discusses the Romantic era revival of animal onomatopoeia, and its ongoing effect in Victorian children’s literature and natural history. The 1830’s see the first use of nonce-syllables to represent bird song as an aid to identification, a device that remains commonplace in field guides to this day, and the first poems that aim to teach children to identify animals by what they say. These developments form a context for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where the contrast between animal that speak and animals that behave like automata is a major theme. Carroll’s reflections on this contrast, and his serious jokes about it, establish the agenda for the whole essay.

A criticism is provided of the 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ translation into Greek and Latin languages of the poem "Casket song" within the play "The Merchant in Venice," by William Shakespeare. An overview of the English author Charles Knight's pictorial volumes of Shakespeare's works is provided.

This essay extends this area of scholarship, arguing that poets such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and Mathilde Blind experiment with epic time in order to challenge geology's displacement of the epic past. While the Victorian geologist and man of letters Charles Lyell incorporates epic poetry into his Principles of Geology (1830-33) in order to show how deep time made the past of epic poetry seem foreshortened and obsolete, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (1850) and Mathilde Blind's "The Ascent of Man" (1889) respond by claiming the epic as a domain that could resist scientific inquiry. In so doing, they show how epic form and epic temporality can be used to explore controversial questions of cosmological origins in ways that empirical science writing could not.

This article argues that Aurora Leigh seeks to redress the divisive work of women’s democratic political representation by way of poetic form to ask whether women must always be regarded as partial citizens. Through the trope of halfness, Barrett Browning establishes a connection between women’s ability to produce writing and produce children, as well as the violent division of women’s bodies, in order to formulate a corrective political relationship between women’s halfness and generativity. Though the fragmentary nature of Aurora Leigh is evident in its very form, Huseby's exploration of the diverse formal and thematic divisions Barrett Browning's verse novel demonstrates the possibility of a different kind of relationship between the fragmentary work of poetic form and the divisive work of the political in the nineteenth century. As the poem’s meter and language performs the halving, splitting, and parting out of women’s bodies, Barrett Browning demonstrates that a cohesion of the poetic and the political is enabled by aggregation, a form of poetic counting closely aligned with both social representation and mathematical collection. Barrett Browning’s attention to halfness reflects a commitment to the value of poetic counting. Fundamentally, and more than other quantifying discourses, poetry captures “the world’s necessities” in their variety and sheer number in ways that do not reduce or flatten their value (or assimilate these necessities into the prerogatives of the economic).

Centered on the unique chronotope of Oxford, this essay traces the ways Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy invoke and compromise our ability to relate past to present. In the sonnet, ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford,’ and the novel, Jude the Obscure, Hopkins and Hardy respectively present the city of Oxford as a central confluence of medieval and early modern pasts with a Victorian present. To further link past and present, the poet and novelist both enter into the medieval conceit of the wind, wherein a lover gains intimacy with the beloved through mutually shared breath, but they do so for cross-purposes. Whereas a connection to the past is preserved in Hopkins’s sonnet by a theological understanding of the ether, any such connection is a dangerous illusion in Hardy’s novel. Yet, even with this divergence Hardy, like Hopkins, still leads the reader into a shared sacramental intimacy suggested through medieval influences on the novel.

This essay reexamines the terms of agency and objectivity that underwrite our critical debates about gender and exchange in Rossetti’s poetry. Critics have long considered the relationship between humans and material things in “Goblin Market” in terms of commodity culture and economic exchange. Much of this scholarship is motivated by a central concern: debating whether the activity of female consumption can occur without women themselves being objects of consumption. Becoming the thing that is consumed, in most readings of the poem, necessarily indicates a loss of agency. This essay proposes an alternate reading: in “Goblin Market,” perception functions as a kind of economy itself — a system of interaction and exchange — and in this economy of perception, the object one perceives may have power over the one who perceives it. From this vantage point, “Goblin Market” is less a poem about retaining subjectivity than it is one about acquiring objectivity. In “Goblin Market” and elsewhere, Rossetti constructs a world in which subjective perception is threatening and in which things can hold positions of surprising power.

This article argues that Victorian lyric poetry -- which often features conspicuously anonymous and dislocated voices, emphasizing the disconnection of a putative utterance from a quasi-anthropomorphized poetic speaker -- prefigures and provides a fresh perspective on sound recording technology. A poem’s iterative formal patterns, like the cylinders of the phonograph that Thomas Edison initially saw as a means of capturing not music but speech, constitute a mechanism for the mental preservation of language; they allow readers to evoke, appropriate, and recontextualize the “voice” of verse. Yet in repeating a mnemonic lyric as in replaying a phonographic recording, what one often internalizes is a nebulous and eerily evacuated voice from which individuating details have been stripped away. So in dehumanizing speech, even while nostalgically invoking embodied utterance by appealing to readers’ and hearers’ memories of it, poems emerge as phonographic precursors. The article uses phonography to offer a new reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s strange poem “The Woodspurge" as a commentary on the emptiness of the lyric voice, exploring the ways in which recording technology recapitulates and elucidates this distinctive emptiness. And having employed memory as an interpretive framework for issues surrounding voice, the article concludes by asking what the connection between lyricism and phonography reveals about Victorian remembering and forgetting.

It is no coincidence that during the same period in which Michael Field believed their work symbolized resurrection and renewal, the cultural moment of the 1890s encouraged artists to gain interest in blurring genre lines. This article suggests that the rise of a “decadent poetic drama,” to borrow Ana Parejo Vadillo’s categorization of Michael Field’s historical dramas, comes in part not, as the couple’s contemporaries and immediate antecedents argue, from a lack of form, but from formal experimentation. If Aristotle believed drama to be an imitation of action, and mimesis to be a showing (or representation) versus a narrative retelling of that action, Michael Field refashions the formal history of drama by playing with voice, rhythm, and structure. Further, I speculate that the couple experiments with ballad meter in The Tragic Mary to incorporate a social mimesis founded on female community and contagious transference, or transport. In this play, Mary Stuart’s three ballads enact an affective communal experience that enables expressions of female desire. The ballad meter, I suggest, enacts the role of affective transport with its contagious meter and rhythm.