dynamics of naming and the triangulation of erotic desire based on Anne Carson's model in Eros the Bittersweet (1986) rather than Rene Girard's or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's.In both 1832 poems and Sappho's fragments, the poetic speaker is named by the addressee, triggering the poet's intensified desire.Sappho prays to Aphrodite in Fragment 1 and moves closer to erotic fulfillment when the goddess names Sappho in reply; and when Elenore addresses the speaker by name he swoons with desire.Proper names label without truly identifying a person, Gray and others aver, yet names can become intimate when used by another.If, as classical scholar and poet Anne Carson argues, desire is triggered by a third, blocking agent in a relationship, Gray suggests that naming itself can function as this agent and hence a motor driving desire.As he wittily observes, Tennyson's and Sappho's erotic poems feature no consummation; rather, it is language and naming that impel eroticism without sating the desiring lover.Michael Sullivan revisits Tennyson's early intertextuality with Byron in the unpublished "I dare not write an Ode" (see Poems of Tennyson, 2nd ed., ed.C. Ricks [Longman], 1:169-72).Sullivan's essay "Sesta Rima as a Mode of Imitation: Hybrid Forms in Anglo-Italian Verse" (Review of English Studies 74: 829-42) focuses principally on Byron's experimental hybrid forms and stanza-switching among decasyllabic lines and balladic meter as he began to move away from Spenserian stanzas and heroic couplets even before he moved to Italy.It was to sesta rima rather than ottava rima that Tennyson likewise turned to imitate Byron and Whistlecraft in "Ode to Pamplea."Mark Llewellyn offers an intricate interlace of Tennyson's intertextuality with exemplars of Decadence, specifically Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance, and more distantly D. H. Lawrence-or rather, their intertextuality with Tennyson springing from his image of a white peacock in "Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white" in The Princess (1847).Moving beyond "influence" or adaptation, "On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s" (Victorian Poetry 61, no.2: 225-43) advances a framework of "encounter, re-encounter, and influence" (p.240).Llewellyn's principal reference points are the fifty, then one hundred, white peacocks Herod offers to Salome in Wilde's

Themes covered by critics this year include historical presentism and representations of the corpse in work by Rene Fox, a materialist examination of the role of the British postal service in sustaining the Brownings' courtship correspondence by Michael Wheeler, and the rhythms of Victorian verse and versification as opposed to Victorian poetry in a collection edited by Lee Behlman and

Abstract: Tennyson’s The Princess (1847) has led readers to different conclusions regarding the poem’s stance on the issue of higher education for women. The Princess ’s complex structure and its multiplicity of voices create a sense of ambiguity that makes it difficult to determine what the true intention of the poem may be, as The Princess seems to mock and endorse the idea of higher education for women simultaneously. The trope of shadows and substance, this article argues, when read in combination with the musical interludes shed light on the poem’s stance on women’s right to higher education. The article begins by examining The Lady of Shalott (1832) in order to trace the importance of the shadow/substance theme and its connection to musicality and sound in Tennyson’s work. After this, analyzing the trope of shadows and substance in combination with the songs sung by the women between the different parts of the men’s tale shows how the tensions created by the disparate elements of The Princess ’s structure and its multiplicity of voices can be made sense of by the combination of music and light. Music and light, this article proposes, work together to offer an interpretation that corroborates feminist readings of The Princess .

Haunting Voices:Thomas Hardy's Boer War Poetry Tai-Chun Ho (bio) Having completed eleven war poems intended for the forthcoming volume Poems of the Past and the Present (November 1901), Thomas Hardy told Florence Henniker in a letter on Christmas Eve 1900: "I am happy to say that not a single one is Jingo or Imperial—a fatal defect according to the judgment of the British majority at present, I dare say."1 Hardy knew the difference between his work and mainstream jingoistic verse, and credited himself with having achieved a style of poetry that defied reader expectations. Asked by the French journal the Revue Bleue about the effect of the South African campaign on English literature, Hardy cited "the vast multiplication of books on the war itself," including "books on former wars," "books of action as opposed to reflection," as well as "large quantities of warlike and patriotic poetry," claiming that " These works naturally throw into the shade works that breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit."2 Hardy's reply points to the tensions between two categories of war poetry ("books of action as opposed to reflection"). It hints at the battle he fought against "books on former wars" and the outpouring of "warlike and patriotic poetry" through his own poems, which "breathe a more quiet and philosophic spirit." Using "Drummer Hodge" to make the case that the conflict in South Africa (1899–1902) gave rise to works prefiguring World War I protest poetry, Malvern van Wyk Smith demonstrated the innovations characterizing Hardy's poem and proclaimed Hardy a precursor of the soldier-poets.3 While scholarship has affirmed and complicated the connections between Hardy and the World War I poets, there has been little discussion of the relationship between Hardy and his literary progenitors during the last Victorian war.4 As Samuel Hynes observes, "Hardy never saw a war, but he nevertheless had a war in his head, derived not from direct experience but from memories and fictions."5 According to Hynes, a range of sources—the epics of Homer and Virgil, the history and local stories of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as Dorchester being "a garrison town" and his interactions with the "resident troops"—constitute what he terms Hardy's "private myths of war" (pp. 245–246). Although Hynes has shed light on the creative processes of Hardy's noncombatant poetry, he [End Page 71] concentrates his attention on the composition of Hardy's war epic—The Dynasts—at the expense of his Boer War poetry, suggesting that the poet "used the Boer War as a sort of trial run for his big intended war poem" (p. 249). This essay seeks to advance our understanding of Hardy's "private myths of war" by focusing on the haunted and haunting voices that feature in his Boer War poems. It reads his poetry of the last Victorian war not as a precursor of World War I poetry but as a continuation of the nineteenth-century war poetry tradition and analyzes it from a standpoint that explores Hardy's relationship with earlier noncombatant poet predecessors and the hitherto unacknowledged continuity and dialogue between mid- and late Victorian war poetry. Hardy, of course, is well-known as a ghost-ridden writer who, in an oft-quoted diary entry of 1888, imagined himself as "putting on the manners of ghosts" and "taking their views of surrounding things" and who, in a 1901 interview, claimed that he was "cut out by nature for a ghost-seer." 6 Treating "Hardy's hauntedness as a biographical and historical phenomenon," Tim Armstrong has investigated the ghost of Emma Gifford, Hardy's first wife who died in 1912, in the Poems of 1912–13, and the intertextual ghosts in his elegiac verses.7 In a 1900 review noting "a constant stream of patriotic verse in the cheaper periodicals," the Argosy commentator discerns that Hardy "has written several poems which none but he could have written: curious, haunting verses, deeply spiritual in meaning and force, and in common with much of the work of modern poets, somewhat difficult to read."8 To describe Hardy's poems as "haunting" is not only to acknowledge their difference...

Dissonant Poetics in George Eliot's "A College Breakfast Party" Hee Eun Helen Lee (bio) The Scots critic John Skelton spoke for many subsequent Victorian poetry critics when in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country he dismissed George Eliot's first volume of poetry, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), as a mere curiosity, a prose writer's labored experiment with verse forms: "[i]t is indeed better poetry than almost anyone except a poet could write" (italics Skelton's).1 He condemns Eliot's poetry for being intellectual without feeling: "George Eliot has much subtlety of intellectual perception, but when she attempts to realise a high subtle transcendental mood of feeling, she is apt to fail" (p. 474). Matthew Browne of The Contemporary Review agreed, finding no "fluency" in Eliot's poetry because it "too often wants spontaneity and simplicity."2 The tone of reviews during her poetic career did not change much. Edward Dowden's review in Littell's Living Age, a few years later, would say that George Eliot is no poet because in her poetry, "the idea stands above the matter as a master above a slave, and subdues the matter to its will."3 The North American Review, assessing The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874), claims that in Eliot "the imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in subjection" (reprinted in van den Broek and Baker, p. 246). Repeatedly in such instances, Eliot's verse is received as somehow forced and hence unpoetic. Such critics read Eliot as purely cerebral, being all brain or all force of will and no natural feeling, thereby inverting the usual gendered conceptions of the brain in Victorian culture. Normally, of course, men were presumed to possess "hard" piercing intellects while women offered "soft" virtues such as sentimentality. Needless to say, intellectual women throughout the nineteenth century were despised by many as unfeminine. When Skelton grants Eliot to have an intellectual "glitter" that is "uncommonly clever" for a woman poet, he echoes the sexism of the tutor Mr. Stelling in The Mill on the Floss (1860), who agrees that females can be superficially clever while still maintaining that they cannot be deep. In the introduction to Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, Margaret [End Page 55] Reynolds discusses the prevailing attitude to women's intellect as inferior to that of men and its implications for poetry. Women's very identities as complementary associated them with sacrifice, emotion, and subservience.4 Poetry as a vocation was not granted to them as it was granted to male poets.5 Early Victorian criticisms of poetesses, therefore, tended to simplify their contributions as being predictable, sentimental effusions, often restricted to the domestic. We know that George Henry Lewes shielded Eliot from reviews by reading them preemptively. However, if he shared anything of these reviews with her, it is noteworthy that she doubles down on the cerebral, "unwomanly" poetry in extraordinary ways in "A College Breakfast Party" (1878), setting the poem in a milieu from which she was excluded. She writes this dense 900-line blank verse poem as a commentary on "college men" and their exclusively male intellectual debates. It is true that by 1874, when the poem was written, women's higher education was available at Girton, the first women's college at Cambridge. Theoretically, Eliot might have written on the subject of ladies' intellectual debates at a women's college, then, but she does not. To the contrary, in this poem, Eliot shows her willingness to address the questions of typically male art in typically male milieux and in typically male ways. So many criticisms of Eliot's poetry are devoted to thematic concerns such as humanistic sympathy that Eliot's investments in the form, music, and nonnarrative structures of poetry are often overlooked. In "A College Breakfast Party," "unpoetic," dissonant poetics serves in a long-standing battle against restrictive representations of femininity. The thorniness and difficulty of Eliot's poem may itself be read as a political protest against the limitations imposed on Victorian women. Unpacking the complications of dissonances and gender will broaden the debate about Eliot's poetics and allow the hearing of fuller music in Eliot...

Victorian Women Poets Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) A. Mary F. Robinson was best known, to her English audience, for her poetry and, to her French audience, as a woman of letters. So begins the introduction to Robinson's "Anglo-French" life in Patricia Rigg's A. Mary F. Robinson (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2021). Rigg seeks to reconcile these dual identities in this comprehensive and engaging biographical study. Rigg's book offers a nuanced look at an international poet: the unorthodoxy of Robinson's life, the integration of various literary styles (poetics, historical, biographical), and her Anglo-French identity. Highlighting Anglo-French literary communities and the social components of Robinson's life, Rigg's biography sets the tone for this year's scholarship on Victorian women poets. Its rich, layered approach—bringing together extensive archival material with personal and familial relationships (Rigg details her time in the Robinson family home and her relationship with Robinson's great-granddaughter by marriage)—offers a methodology that foregrounds materiality, affect, and form. Similarly, James Diedrick's edited edition for the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise Series, Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, U.K.: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2021) foregrounds Blind's contributions as a transnational and displaced (or expatriate) writer. His scholarly edition of Blind's late poetry brings three volumes (published between 1889 and 1895) together, alongside selections of her reviews and literary essays, to foreground Blind's experimental verse forms and affiliations with leading Decadent communities. The scholarship, then, of 2021 predominantly interrogates an intersectional approach to Victorian women poets: from exploring the ecological impact of Decadent poets to the intersections of poetry with a wide range of nineteenth-century sciences, transnational and cosmopolitan outlooks, and various modes of being. In this way, Victorian poetry becomes a site of curiosity, exchange, and engagement—in all senses of the word—with the world. In "Haptic Ekphrasis" (Victorian Studies 64, no. 1 [2021]: 88–114), Jill R. Ehnenn reconsiders the ekphrastic text, usually defined as a technology of vision: the relationship between word and image. In the Victorian period—and more broadly—ekphrasis involves not only vision but a technology of feeling, "both touch and emotion" (p. 89). In what Ehnenn calls "haptic ekphrasis," she identifies the centrality of affect and the sensing body as a method of [End Page 418] phenomenological interpretation and poetic encounter, or poetry's ability to do something, to move our bodies and brains into reconsiderations of the self/ object within the world (in both the nineteenth century and our world today). She makes three central claims. Focusing on haptics alongside vision enables reconsiderations of poetic form that foreground the "visceral register of experience" (p. 92). New ways of analyzing poetry emerge when we consider the tactility of the ekphrastic text or the arousal of emotion when we are attuned to meter and metrical variance. Rather than viewing ekphrasis as a description of an art object, haptic ekphrasis documents the poet's encounter with the art object. When reading poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850) or Julia Margaret Cameron's "On a Portrait" (1876), with priority given to haptics, formal readings encourage sympathy for the object and what it represents. The language of sympathy here foregrounds another of Ehnenn's claims: that haptic ekphrasis resonates with the nineteenth-century discursive shift from sympathy to empathy (Einfühlung). Most intriguingly, perhaps, Ehnenn identifies haptic ekphrasis as a strategic technique for "minoritarian" (women and queer) writers (p. 100). Through insightful close readings of poetry by John Gray, Olive Custance, Julia Margaret Cameron, Graham R. Tomson, and the Bengali poet Sarojini Naidu, Ehnenn showcases how haptic readings communicate the complexities of lived experiences as a woman or queer poet. Not only, then, does haptic ekphrasis permit realistic detail and transportation of feeling, but "ekphrasis built on the haptic . . . permits the author to safely articulate the ineffable, the non-canonical, and the private" (p. 105). In providing a new framework from which to understand ekphrasis, Ehnenn points toward the phenomenological and epistemological potentials of poetic experience and poetic encounter—for both the Victorians and the twenty-first-century reader. Sight and...