Rhythmic Intimacy, Spasmodic Epistemology (Critical Essay‪)‬

AMONG THE MANY REASONS CRITICS IN THE 1850s CONDEMNED WHAT WAS called the Spasmodic style, none appears to have perplexed and frustrated readers so much as the poets' seemingly irregular use of rhythm. In response to Sydney Dobell's 1856 volume England in Time of War, a critic for the Saturday Review complains that the poet "neither sees, feels, nor thinks like ordinary men.... Before we are half through the book, we begin to distrust the evidence of our senses." (1) A writer for the National Review similarly critiques the apparent disorder of Dobell's poetry: "His thoughts and fancies flow like the sounds from an instrument of music, struck by the hand of a child,--a jumble of sweet and disconnected notes, without order or harmony." (2) But Dobell and his Spasmodic compatriots were not alone in challenging the senses of their readers, and literary critics in the 1850s show increasing indignation and anxiety that any poet should "rel[y] on the sympathy of the interpreter" to intuit a poem's intended rhythmic design. (3) Writing of Robert Browning's Men and Women, a reviewer in the Athenaeum protests that recent poets Though concerned with more than formal irregularity, the reviewer identifies his contemporaries' rhythmic waywardness as part and parcel of their poems' "unpoetic garniture," their difficult language, and, here in the case of Browning, the shocking images and figurative language. Many critics simply did not know how to read rhythmically irregular poetry, and they did not trust, or did not want to trust, to their intuition. (4)