Productive Convergences, Producing Converts‪.‬

Once, a well-respected professor of English, when told that I was doing some work on Robert Browning, replied, "I've always found Browning just so hokey, in that Victorian way." Unfortunately, in recent decades such dismissive attitudes toward Victorian poetry have been quite common among literary scholars (even if the honesty to admit them so openly has not), and many students of literature have had so little contact with Victorian poetry that they can muster no opinion at all. Scholars of Victorian poetry are now, however, in an excellent position to counter this dismissal and neglect. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new trend in literary criticism, one that respects both the formal structures and the social contexts of poems. Perhaps in the coming years, we will also see a blend of poetic theory with narratology. Both trends would be especially well-suited to highlight the strengths of Victorian poetry and to earn the attention of students and scholars. Until very recently, literary critics had been living with the legacy of major critical movements which explicitly advocated a division between form and content, valuing one and decrying the other. We are, by now, quite familiar with accounts of New Criticism's espousal of detailed formal analysis to the exclusion of all contextual considerations, of Deconstruction's attempts to demystify both poets' and New Critics' failed attempts to achieve unity and stable signification, and of New Historicism's exposure of social contexts and ideologies that had been occluded by poetic forms and formalist approaches. The critical gap between formal structures and social concerns was partly bridged by movements intent on reclaiming the writings of women, the working classes, and colonial and post-colonial subjects. By bringing marginalized writers into the canon, practitioners of gender/genre criticism, for instance, refocused attention on how women writers contested and reevaluated male canonical forms. This process of reclaiming alternate literary traditions, and their alternate poetic forms, is an important project that continues today, often within the pages of this journal, as in Bonnie Robinson's introduction to a special issue on women writers of 1890-1918. She draws our attention to the possibility that the conservative poetics of late-Victorian and early-Modernist women writers may belie their radical politics, offering an inversion of the radical poetics and conservative politics of their male Modernist counterparts. (1) Of course, the relation between poetic forms and political beliefs need not be an exclusively hostile one, and canonical poets are also capable of contesting previous poetic forms and imbuing their poetic experiments with a political valence. An expansion of critical approaches that recognize and respect the interdependence of poetic forms and social contexts was needed.