Surface Tension

By Julie Lyles Carr

Taking Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as its primary subjects, Surface Tension reveals how these later Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Turning to contemporary experimental poets and theorists of poetry, such as Andrew Joron, Lisa Robertson, Christopher Nealon, and Joan Retallack, it goes on to reveal how our own poetry's fascination with complex surfaces and imagined social transformation has deep and under-recognized ties to Victorian concepts. Surface Tension offers new insights into the debt we owe to the most radical of the Victorians while yielding new understandings of how late Victorian poetry, even when least explicitly political, engages, and often re-envisions, the period's pressing anxieties about social progress, decadence, and revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781564788405

Julie Lyles Carr

Julie Lyles Carr holds a degree in psychology which she uses every day in her parenting of eight children and also a degree in English Literature, which came in handy for writing a book on parenting. She is a popular speaker and blogger. She serves as the Pastor of Women’s Ministry at her home church of LifeAustin in Austin, Texas. Julie is also the Founder and Executive Director of Legacy of Hope Austin, a non-profit group dedicated to serving families of children with special needs. Julie and her husband Michael have been married for almost twenty-six years.

Book preview

SURFACE TENSION

RUPTURAL TIME AND THE POETICS OF DESIRE

IN LATE VICTORIAN POETRY

JULIE CARR

Epigraph

But your eyes proclaim

That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there

And nothing can exist except what’s there.

JOHN ASHBERY, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

But the chaos of surfaces compels us to new states of happiness.

LISA ROBERTSON, "Occasional Work and 7 Walks from the

Office for Soft Architecture."

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I: Matthew Arnold’s Pregnant Poetry

I. Introduction

II. The Future Contained: Democracy and Culture and Anarchy

III. Thy Remote and Sphered Course: Desire and Isolation in Arnold’s Marguerite Poems.

IV. The Poetics of Shame: Wragg

V. Problems with Birth

VI. Empedocles on Etna: The Unbirthing of the Poem

VII. Conclusion

CHAPTER II: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Aesthetics of Emergency

I. Introduction

II. Saint Agnes of Intercession: The Painter of Modern Life and the Critic

III. The Blessed Damozel and Bridal Birth: The Ethics of Eros

IV. Conclusion: The Monochord and the Aesthetics of Emergency

CHAPTER III: Murder in Utopia: William Morris and the Surface of Desire

I. Introduction

II. The Surface of Desire

III. Murder in Utopia

IV. Conclusion: The Future of Organic Form

CHAPTER IV: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Reck of the Moment

I. Introduction

II. Early Reception: Undying Spirit

III. Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves: The Reck of the Moment

CODA: Messianism Now, or, Other Victorians

ENDNOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX

About the Author

Copyright

Other Works by Julie Carr

PREFACE

In writing this book over many years, my sense of its audience has shifted. As it began as a dissertation, its earliest drafts were intended for a community of scholars, Victorian scholars specifically, and those interested in Victorian poetry even more. But this group, though one I admire from something of a distance, has not become my primary intellectual or creative community. As a poet and a publisher of poetry and innovative fiction and prose, I belong first and last to a community of contemporary writers, of poets. After such a long time of writing, reading, giving readings, teaching, publishing, and curating within this community, it would be impossible, I think, for me to write anything that was not in some sense for them, for the poets, which is to say, for my friends. In America’s literary landscape, in English and Creative Writing departments all over the country, there is often a divide between the scholars and the so-called creative writers, one that is generally crossed only by critics of contemporary literature. This book is mostly not about contemporary literature, and yet I hope it ventures across that divide anyway, speaking finally to both scholars and poets about a few figures from a hundred and fifty years ago in a way that might be useful, or at least stimulating. For the poets, I hope to bring those nineteenth-century writers in order to expand what we think of as the present. For the scholars, my hope, of course, is that the arguments here will feel interesting and convincing. But I also hope to reveal something about the ways that contemporary poets think about their work, and in so doing to draw a new line of connection between the Victorians and ourselves. This is not a book that mines the archive for new materials, nor is it a book that finds new figures to draw into our canon. However, in that this is a book by a poet, and one that encourages us to open rather than re-inscribe our sense of the period, of periodization in general, I hope it might, in perhaps revealing something new about contemporary poems and poets, help scholars of Victorian poetry to see the familiar in a different light.

For me, this has finally become a book about desire—the desire that reading carries. For me—for all writers, I assume—to read a poem of great complexity, mystery, and passion, like the poems discussed here, is to ignite the desire to write. This is also a book about the desire to convince someone, perhaps myself, of the importance, the value, the necessity of poems, of their ability to answer to crisis, to imagine change, to move toward a future. Finally, the writing of this book is about the desire for a life that continues to think through the language of poetry, which is to say, the language of motion and play, the language of question and suspension, the language of surface and depth.

I have many people to thank. First, as always, my parents—all four of them—whose own lives have been models of engaged passion, of ethically-informed creativity. I owe a huge thanks to Kent Puckett, an exemplary teacher and scholar who brings to his own writing and teaching an enormous amount of pleasure and passion, who gave to me the greatest gift, the gift of attention, and whose capacity for listening I am still trying to emulate. I am grateful also to Steven Goldsmith for his wide-reaching intellect and his patient and unyieldingly clear conversation, and for his friendship. Others at the University of California, Berkeley—Sharon Marcus, Catherine Gallagher, Lyn Hejinian, Kevis Goodman, and Charles Altieri—all provided me with invaluable support and, as importantly, examples of what it might mean to be a scholar in a world that cares little for its scholars, what it might mean to maintain a faith in intellectual curiosity as a high value in and of itself. My colleagues at the University of Colorado: Sue Zemka, William Kuskin, Lori Emerson, and Patrick Greaney especially, have all been a part of this project, directly or indirectly, and I am grateful to all of them for their help, and also for their friendship. Christopher Nealon deserves a special thanks for modeling so beautifully the balancing act that is the life of a poet scholar, but also for inspiring me to write as clearly as I can and to care as deeply as I can for my material. Finally, I have other friends to thank who helped me in one way or another through this process: Jessica Fisher, Margaret Ronda, Linda Norton, Jennifer Pap, Noah Eli Gordon, John-Michael Rivera, Jeffrey Robinson, Andrew Zawacki, Andrew Joron, Brian Henry, K.J. Holmes, Rusty Morrison, Laynie Browne: all of these people have provided me with a kind of background of motivation because of my desire to speak with them, to have them hear me, and to hear them as well. What I would do, or who I would be, without these friendships, is impossible to imagine. So I use this opportunity to thank these friends for all of it.

Finally, I dedicated this book to Tim Roberts, for love.

INTRODUCTION

On he flared . . .

John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion i

1.

If a poem has a surface and a depth—the one embellishing, ornamental, and attractive, the other meaningful, soulful, ideational—there can be little debate about which is the principal part. The poem’s surface, its formal devices and linguistic play, is valuable for what it serves: its role is supportive, and therefore secondary. The poem’s depth, whether construed as idea, argument, emotional truth, or narrative, is by contrast valuable even when the surface is removed, even when the poem is translated into ordinary speech. But what happens when the pathway from surface to depth approaches impenetrability? What happens to the poem’s importance, its value, its force, when its decorative qualities begin to assert themselves over and into content, when the poem’s argument or message loses itself in the folds of ornament?

These are the questions of modern and postmodern poetics and might seem to have less purchase in a study of Victorian poetry—a poetry that is commonly understood to be perhaps decorative, but primarily ideological, devotional, narrative, or dramatic, and not, as in the self-conscious works of the twentieth century, intensely focused on language’s surfaces, on language as surface.ii And yet, from Tennyson’s highly wrought sonic experiments to Swinburne’s metrically vigorous and syntactically complex poems, one finds in Victorian poetry a longing for language to move toward abstraction—to move in the directions that the modernists—Mallarmé, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky, for example—would take it, toward the condition of music.

In the poets I examine, this interest in the surfaces of language is particularly intensified. Furthermore, many of the deep un-rests of the latter half of the nineteenth century—the epistemological, political, and social tensions of the period—register themselves in and as a debate about the status of the surface in poetics. As Victorian poets and theorists of poetry and art—Arthur Hallam, J. S. Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, D.G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—sought to define the social role of the poet and of poetry in their period, sought to understand or forge a relationship between poetry and social change, cultural criticism, revolutionary or conservative political positions, they participated in a long and ongoing debate about the social value of highly wrought aesthetic surfaces.

As its title indicates, this book examines the relationships among such complex textual surfaces, extreme or intense affect, and engagements with temporality in the works of four major poets: Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.iii With the exception of Arnold, these poets and their poems speak for a specific strain in Victorian temporality, especially as it is applied to visions of social change. Whereas the Victorian period is generally and justly thought of as dedicated to gradual, developmental social progress, numerous studies from Jerome Hamilton Buckley’s seminal book, The Triumph of Time (1966), forward have argued that the latter half of the nineteenth century experienced an apocalyptic mood, a mood encouraged by developments in physics, geology, biology, politics, and by growing religious doubt.iv I argue that the formal intricacy of much of the poetry of this late Victorian period, while often deliberately employed to provoke intense affectivity, also and importantly serves to invoke this cataclysmic, as opposed to progressive, sense of change.

I chose Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins as primary subjects because of the ways in which each models this cultural engagement with cataclysmic temporality, though each poet turns his attention toward a different arena of—and for—change. Rossetti’s lens is firstly focused on selfhood, on erotic and aesthetic experiences and their effects on the transformation of the self. Morris, a committed socialist (who, long before reading Marx, was deeply concerned with the problems of alienated and oppressed labor), focused on social and political transformation—eventually on Marxist revolution per se, but earlier in his career on revolutionizing aesthetic production as a means toward achieving a revolutionized political and economic future. Hopkins was, of course, concerned with spiritual transformation, that of the individual subject, and that of the larger community. My fourth figure, though the one I discuss first, Matthew Arnold, stands somewhat uneasily as the counterpoint to these poets of transformation. Arnold was by all accounts a gradualist, consistently working toward developmental social change, mostly through advancements in public education. And yet, in his poetics (though not necessarily in his poems, as we will see), Arnold argues for a conservative aesthetic, one that privileges content over form, or depth over surface. Poems, for Arnold, function best when they are transparent spheres in which ideas can be contained. This poetics of containment, wed as it is to gradualist ideas of progress, is thus contrasted with the poetics of surface, which the other poets in this study so enthusiastically perform.

Deeply dissatisfied with the political and cultural moment in which they found themselves, Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins imagined their work in revolutionary terms, even though this meant quite different things for each of them. My intention will be to demonstrate the connections these poets forged between the intricacies of their poetic surfaces and the sudden transformations they imagined.v

Thomas Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdrockh announces the period’s fascination with the problem of surface and depth when, in his Philosophy of Clothes, he expounds the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; [and] undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man’s earthly interests, ‘are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes’ (Carlyle, 40). Teufelsdrockh insists that Society is founded upon Cloth, while his editor maintains that "a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one) (50). Of course Carlyle’s prose and the layered structure of his splendid rhapsody (xxii) provide ample opportunity for thinking about the relationship between surface and depth in literary works. One hardly knows whether for Carlyle artifice is a burden (as he argues in Characteristics," his treatise against self-consciousness) or a source of authorial pride. Perhaps both.

More than forty years later, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, Poetry is speech . . . framed to be heard for its own sake and interest over and above its interests of meaning, and we understand this as defense of and encouragement for his own ornate and densely woven textual surfaces (Journals, 289). By placing the value of the poetic utterance directly on language as such, rather than on its referent, Hopkins, the most modern of the poets in question, turns our attention to the sensations that poetic language creates rather than the cognitions that it provokes.

This valuation of surface is everywhere in Hopkins (even though for Hopkins, the surfaces of the physical world, what he called inscape, provide the deepest, because eternal, Revelation).vi But importantly, Hopkins’s celebration of the surface is not unique in late Victorian poetics. Indeed, much British poetry written during the latter half of the century by the Pre-Raphaelites and those associated with them emphasizes surfaces both as subject-matter for poems and as the most valued aspect of poems themselves. Rossetti’s faces and reflections, Morris’s fabrics and fonts, Hopkins’s cloud formations and animal hides—all of these register an obsession with visual pattern and form—what Ruskin called the science of aspects. Needless to say, Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins were not only writing about visual surfaces, they were also immersed in creating and evaluating visual arts. While Hopkins was not a painter, he considered becoming one early on, and his notebooks are filled with sketches and references to visual culture.vii Rossetti, of course a painter as well as a poet, made many works that incorporated both arts, and Morris designed wallpapers, textiles, carpets, and tapestry, sometimes while he wrote or translated epic poems. And yet, despite the interest of the visual works these poets produced, my intention is to examine how and why they manipulated word, line, and poetic sequence to such a degree that their poems became ornate and highly-wrought surfaces themselves.

In molecular physics surface tension describes the effect of molecular bonding at the surface of a liquid. By virtue of being on top, these molecules have fewer molecules with which to bond, thus the energetic bonds between them are stronger than they would otherwise be. I use this metaphor because in the poems I examine a similar bonding effect occurs within the poem’s lexicon; homophonic relationships such as internal rhyme, near-rhyme, repetition, alliteration, metathesis, and assonance (what Hopkins called oftening, over-and-overing, aftering)viii tend to draw the reader’s attention to the sounds and shapes of the words themselves, at times distracting her from the semantic meaning the words are meant to impart.ix In other instances, metonymic and associative chains, as well as intertextual references, neologisms, excessive detail, rhythmic disruptions, and the anagrammatic and decorative aspects of words and letters, similarly distract the reader from the poem’s story or message, creating the sense that the thickened surface is distinct from, and perhaps in the way of, the poem’s actual content. However, to return to physics, when a fluid demonstrates surface tension, one need only to pierce the surface to discover that the difference between surface and depth is an illusion; the two are molecularly (though not energetically) identical. This is how I understand the poetry I address; despite the resistance of the surface, there exists a fluid continuity between the poem’s conceptual content and its form. My analysis of the formal qualities of these poetries thus does not stand at a remove from either the poems’ contexts or the social meanings they express. Rather, as in the formalist criticism of Herbert Tucker, Isobel Armstrong, Susan Wolfson, and many others, formal analysis is meant to reveal how poetry makes meanings at the level of its most intricate and intimate engagements with language.

This study thus asks questions about how the Victorians understood the social uses of poetry and of the aesthetic more broadly. But it also asks a more general question about how aesthetic productions that emphasize ornament and affect might be understood to participate in social critique and, ultimately, in social change. In this sense my project contributes to the growing interest in the political possibilities of aesthetic forms, one that has tended, with some notable exceptions, to focus on Romantic or contemporary texts.x I assert the primacy of Victorian poetry in terms of its political commitments as well as its lasting relevance to contemporary poets and theorists of poetics, arguing that this poetry is relevant to us now specifically because of how the difficult aesthetic surface is invoked as an agent of radical change. Thus, while this study is in one sense historical, it is also theoretical. The periodization of literary texts makes sense when we are reading these texts for the history, literary and otherwise, of which they speak. But texts and the theoretical positions within them have lives that extend far beyond their historical origination, even as they necessarily carry that history as well. The work of art . . . is essentially a-historic . . . , wrote Walter Benjamin, [for] the specific historicity of works of art is not manifested in the ‘history of art’ but in their interpretations (qtd. in Moses, 85).

Thus I read these poems not only for what they teach us about the years in which they were written, but also for how they might help us to reflect on our contemporary assumptions and attitudes about how aesthetic productions participate in transformation.

2.

With this equivocal periodization in mind, I would like to begin with a text that hangs between the Romantic and Victorian periods: John Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion. The poem, a revision of Keats’s earlier Hyperion fragment, was written in 1819, but was not printed until 1856, and even then in a very limited edition. Bridges and Hopkins knew the poem, but it is likely that Arnold, Rossetti, and Morris were familiar only with the earlier version, published in 1820.xi However, this is less a question of influence than of confluence: I choose The Fall because it is here that Keats most clearly lays out the problem of poetry’s social usefulness once the dominance of depth over surface is undone. I choose Keats, rather than the more obviously political Shelley, for three reasons. First, Keats is the most beloved poet of the Pre-Raphaelites. Drawn to his medievalism, his enthrallment with sensation, the struggle in his work between the ideal and the real, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), and Tennyson before them, turned to Keats as an important, even necessary, predecessor. xii Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt’s first exhibited painting at the Academy was The Eve of St. Agnes, taken from Keats’s poem of that name. John Millais’s first painting that bore the PRB insignia was of a scene from Keats’s Isabella (Thompson, 51). The convergence of the original Pre-Raphaelites—including Rossetti, Hunt and Millais—occurred at least in part because of their shared enthusiasm for Keats. Some critics maintain that it was in fact Keats’s interest in Italian art before the time of Raphael that inspired Rossetti to come up with the term Pre-Raphaelite. xiii William Morris concludes News from Nowhere with a direct reference to the last line of Ode to a Nightingale.xiv Matthew Arnold was also strongly influenced by Keats—perhaps most interestingly so because the influence was also agonistic.xv

I begin with Keats also because if periodization has anything to do with reception, then Keats is in at least one limited sense a Victorian poet. It was in the Victorian period that Keats’s poetry, as George Ford puts it, came into its own (2).xvi There were no reprints of Keats’s work until 1840, and the first biography of Keats was published in 1848. Ford’s important study, Keats and the Victorians, makes clear that the Victorian poets and Keats hold each other in mutual debt: while the former owe much of their art to Keats’s influence, he owes much of his fame to theirs.xvii

The third reason I have chosen to begin with Keats has to do with precisely how Keats’s work might be read as critical, as opposed to purely aestheticist. Keats’s poetry, like that of Rossetti and Hopkins, is not, or rarely, overtly political in theme. Rather, the poems openly consider, or simply evoke, questions about the relationship between aesthetic experience and social responsibility. While such concerns run throughout Keats’s poems and letters, The Fall of Hyperion most directly confronts the pressing question of the artist’s social role, a question that animates all of this book’s subsequent chapters.xviii

In the now canonical essay, The Resistance to Theory (1986), Paul de Man takes on various semantic uncertainties and opacities in the title of The Fall of Hyperion in order to demonstrate how the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means (15). No grammatical decoding, de Man continues, however refined, could claim to reach the determining figural dimensions of a text (16). De Man points to two moments of indeterminacy in Keats’s title, and argues that once introduced, these options create alternative ways of understanding the poem, alternatives which contradict each other to such a degree that they invent an impasse of understanding just at the poem’s entryway. We do not need to repeat the specifics of de Man’s argument here, but it is important to note that for de Man, this undoing of grammatical sense is not mere play.xix Rather, such reading practices constitute the heroic appeal of literary theory, for it is precisely this disturbance of the stable cognitive field that extends from grammar to logic (17) that allows theory to do the work of upset[ting] rooted ideologies by revealing the mechanics of their workings (11).

The choice of Keats as an object-lesson for such upsetting is no accident, of course, for Keats theorized the pleasures and profits of indeterminacy long before de Man. Negative capability—the capacity to reside in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—is one way of defining de Manian reading. And yet, what we find when we move beyond the title of The Fall is that for Keats, language’s opacity, rather than simply imposing a destabilizing force into ideologies, presents ethical problems, problems that Keats does not resolve (and neither, of course, does de Man). And it is precisely these ethical problems, as we will see, which resound so deeply in the works of nineteenth-century poets who follow him.

In The Fall of Hyperion, the aspiring poet engages in a developmental process by which he attempts to advance from dreamer—one who vexes the world—to poet—one who pours out a balm upon it. The final step in this process is a direct confrontation with the muse. Clearly, for Keats, the true poet is a healer, deeply engaged in the world and responsible toward others. And yet the advancement of the speaker into the role of poet leads, in this poem, to a tautological silence that speaks less for the poet’s healing capacity than for his vacancy. The poem opens on the speaker’s worry that despite his best efforts, he might turn out to be nothing but a dreamer, but its conclusion touches a more central anxiety: the tragic vision to which the speaker aspires fails in this poem, and in the earlier Hyperion fragment, not because of the speaker’s unworthiness, but because of language’s opacity, its potential failure to mean beyond its surface.xx

Once Keats’s poet (under the threat of death) has successfully mounted the muse’s altar steps, he is confronted with her veiled face, which both attracts and terrifies him. This muse, a veiled shade, refuses to reveal meaning, and thus presents an irrepressible challenge to the poet who has staked his life on poetry’s power to heal. Moreover, once he lifts the muse’s veil, her opacity only thickens, for the exposed face is itself a veil—her visionless eyes express nothing and immediately he desires to see into them as well. He is then remarkably allowed access to her hollow brain, and yet what should be a moment of revelation is instead a tautology: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, the passage begins, and this is the key rhetorical move of the poem: within the veiled shade is a shady vale. Keats’s muse has no within. Language, to say it more simply, is its own referent. Again de Man: "It is not . . . a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language" (Resistance, 11).

And yet I believe the poem speaks of more than just language, and thus forces us to stretch away from the linguistic turn de Manian reading can stand for here. For again, the poet’s muse, this hollow, barren womb—is Mnemosyne. The act of identification between the poet and his muse, figured as an invasion of her mind, is the self’s attempt to penetrate its own history, its own depths. That the scene thus revealed is one of non-redemptive and non-productive stasis (and what could be more static than tautology?) suggests that the poetic self is finally construed as lack. Keats’s question, articulated in The Fall as whether the poet vexes the world or pours out a balm upon it, suggests that for Keats, the emptied selfhood of the poet is bound in moral tension. For if the writing self has no identity, if the writer/muse is an empty space, then where does one locate one’s responsibility to others? If there is no I, then what can I do for you?

In Keats’s famous October, 1818 letter to Richard Woodhouse he writes:

If then [the poet] has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would right write no more . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to to [sic] press upon me that I am in very little time an[ni]hilated. (Letters, 151)

Here is Keats’s anxiety about his cipher-like subjectivity. Even the error—right where he meant, write—seems to betray the problem of social isolation that arises from the absented self as a moral problem. The painful moral self-doubt is amplified in the next paragraph of the letter when Keats writes, I am ambitious of doing the world some good . . . I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. In this prose rendition of the poet’s ascent to tragic vision in The Fall, we see clearly that the ascent is meant as a movement toward social usefulness, or healing power. And yet we also see that for Keats, whose understanding of the poet’s selfhood strips it of ground, of center, and of necessary relation to others, this moral ambition is in crisis.

The barren scene within the muse’s mind, as I’ve said, returns us directly to her opacity, her veil/vale. And while the speaker has acquired, in this moment, the vision which wins him the right to be called a poet, what he sees has No stir of life, for it is the scene of the fallen Titans, the mythical moment of post-revolutionary disappointment. Saturn, the fallen deity, degraded, cold, upon the sodden ground, speaks only to instruct his brethren gods to moan for their own loss of power. This moaning is the inarticulate sound of energy stripped of agency. It is, in another way of reading, the failure of language that results from the poet’s full identification with the muse, which is to say, the poet’s full identification with himself as poet, as negativity. The burden of the vale/veil is, then, the suffocating burden of language’s self-reflexivity, a burden that is all the more painful because of the manner in which it radiates outward toward the moral and indeed political tensions within Keats’s larger poetic project. xxi

3.

If Paul de Man provides us with one way of thinking about the relationship between Keatsian indeterminacy and excess and the social uses of the literary, a critic much closer to Keats’s moment does as well. Matthew Arnold’s 1853 Preface to Poems, in setting out to describe and prescribe the function of poetry at the present time, rails against the Keatsian School precisely because of what Arnold deems contemporary poets’ (such as his unnamed antagonist, Alexander Smith’s) overindulgence in affect and sensation, including the sensations of language itself. Such work, Arnold argues, can serve no useful social function because it is too enamored of surfaces—too fascinated by momentary and sudden expressions of beauty, which fail to add up to any determinate meaning. Yet for Arnold, the problem is not only or even primarily that such work is too interested in its own language, it is also that such work is over-invested in affect, in specifically the non-productive affect of unresolved desire—an emotional territory we cannot not associate with Keats.

Perhaps the largest problem that Keatsian poetics brings up for Victorian readers is this problem of desire. Expressions of intense and ongoing longing press against Victorian masculinity’s dominant ethos of renunciation, disinterestedness, rationality, and social usefulness. James Najarian argues that while Keats was one of the major figures of influence in the Victorian period, his sensuous diction made writers both imitate it and fear the ways that it might implicate their own bodies (1). And Susan Wolfson calls Keats the sign of an unseemly desire, arguing that for Romantics and Victorians alike, Keats’s celebrations of Eros, his perpetual youth, his immersion in the languages of physical pleasure and pain, and the affront that