Whither, Whether, Woolf: Victorian Poetry and A Room of One's Own‪.‬

This is not, of course, the first time the question "Whither Victorian Poetry?" has been posed. In its lovely, archaic locution, it hearkens back to the Victorian poets themselves, and surely they had the keenest sense of how confusing they might be to posterity. But one of the finest meditations on this question is that of a modernist, Virginia Woolf, in the opening pages of A Room of One's Own (1929). Woolf begins her survey of British literary history by wondering whatever happened to Victorian poetry, questioning why it cannot be written, or possibly even read--at least with unalloyed pleasure--any longer. My own response to the question posed by this special issue of Victorian Poetry follows Woolf's turning footsteps, as she asks where this literature went, as well as whether we can or would want to get it back. Woolf suggests ways in which this body of work might continue to hold not only delights but also urgent uses for later readers, and in doing so she imagines a future for Victorian poetry that the poets themselves might have doubted. "Whither Victorian Poetry?" is essentially the question Virginia Woolf asks as the luncheon at the Oxbridge male college draws to a close. Happening to look out the window and see a Manx cat she concludes, "Something seemed lacking, something seemed missing" in that now-famous feline, and still more in the conversation around her. Woolf tells us she "listened with all my ears," and what she comes to hear is what she almost cannot hear: "a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves." Seeking to "set that humming noise to words," she opens a book magically to hand by the window-seat and "turned casually enough to Tennyson." Here is the sequence of poems and questions that follows: