Victorian Poetry's Modernity (Critical Essay‪)‬

The title of this special issue, "Whither Victorian Poetry?" poses a somewhat paradoxical question. To ask of an object "whither" is to imply the possibility of change, yet the object specified is defined by its temporal closure and completion. How can "Victorian Poetry," now over a century past, change or have a future? The way out of this impasse is, needless to say, through interpretation, criticism, and scholarship--the activities through which we give a future to what would otherwise live in a completed and static existence. In thinking about the question posed by this issue's title, I became convinced that Victorian poetry particularly invokes the paradoxes of temporality, interpretation, and the construction of pastness and futurity. Kathy Psomiades has recently argued that "almost all versions of the standard story about the field in the twentieth century end with the invocation of some point in the recent past, or perhaps just now arising, or anticipated in the near future, when Victorian poetry receives its proper due at last." (1) She confirms my instinct that the question of the "future" of Victorian poetry is particularly over-determined. Here I want not to try to repay this debt supposedly owed Victorian poetry, but to consider the ways that both this work, and the scholarly field devoted to it, define their relation to temporality and to constructions of the present and future. In particular, I want to consider the relation of Victorian poetry to modernity and the modern, and to wonder what it would mean to bring this body of poetry more closely into conversation with both nineteenth-and twentieth-century accounts and theories of European or trans-national modernity. I am thinking of "modernity" in the sense defined by Jurgen Habermas in his essay "Modernity--an Unfinished Project." Habermas explains that "the word 'modern' in its Latin form 'modernus' was used for the first time in the late 5th century in order to distinguish the present, which had become officially Christian, from the Roman and pagan past.' (2) Distinctions between the "modern" era and an ancient past "appeared and reappeared" over the centuries until, after the French Revolution, another and historically new "form of modernist consciousness was formed," a "radicalized consciousness of modernity which freed itself from all specific historical ties." Habermas locates the clearest moment of emergence for this new form of modernist consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century: