Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address

By Justin A. Sider

Valedictory addresses offer a way to conceptualize the relation of self to others, private to public, ephemeral to eternal. Whether deathbed pronouncements, political capitulations, or seafaring farewells, "parting words" played a crucial role in the social imagination of Victorian writing. In this compelling new book, Justin Sider traces these public addresses across a wide range of works, from poems by Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, to essays by Twain and Wilde, to novels by Dickens and Eliot.

Ironically, while the Victorian era saw the loss of faith in a unitary national public, it asked poetry to address just such a public. Attending to the form, rather than the discursive content, of poets' engagement with public culture, Parting Words explains how the valedictory allowed Victorian poets to explore the ways their poems might be received by distant and anonymous readers in an emergent mass culture. Using a wide array of materials such as letters and reviews to describe the rapidly changing print culture in which poets were intervening, Sider shows how the growing diversification and destabilization of the Victorian reading public was countered by the demand for a public poetry. Characteristically, the speakers of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna" imagine their farewells as simultaneous entrances into a public space where they and their readers, however distant, might yet meet. This new consciousness anticipated modernist poetry, which in turn used the valedictory to underscore the futility and alienation of such hopes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941837

Book preview

Parting Words

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Herbert F. Tucker, Editor

William R. McKelvy, Jill Rappoport, and Andrew M. Stauffer, Associate Editors

Justin A. Sider

Parting Words

Victorian Poetry and Public Address

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2018

ISBN 978-0-8139-4182-0 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4183-7 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: iStock/Andrew_Howe

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Last Things First

ONE Answer, Echoes, Dying: Tennyson’s Farewells

TWO Dramatic Monologue and the Ends of Character

THREE Matthew Arnold’s Accomplished Figures

FOUR The Consummated Spell: Swinburne’s Style

Coda: Disavowing the Victorians

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Finishing a book about parting words, I am glad to devote mine to the colleagues, friends, and family who have made this endeavor possible. At Yale University, my advisors Leslie Brisman and Stefanie Markovits have been unfailing sources of support. Leslie has been a mentor longer than he likely knows, having sent an undergraduate poet from UConn a kind note about his writing years before that student arrived at Yale for a doctorate. And Stefanie has taught me how much richer our field can be when scholarly exchange is joined to friendship. Warm thanks are owed the many other colleagues who read and commented on the manuscript. Janice Carlisle did more than read multiple versions; she helped make these pages into a book. Paul Fry and Joe Roach also read the full manuscript and offered generous feedback. Ben Glaser and Naomi Levine read and commented on the introduction, though years of their conversation about poetry have left a mark on the entire volume. An informal working group composed of Daniel Jump, Lina Moe, Natalie Prizel, and Sarah Stone improved much of this writing at various stages. I owe a particular debt to Natalie, my Victorianist fellow-traveler, whose intelligence and generosity are an inspiration. Thanks go as well to Samuel Fallon, Len Gutkin, and Thomas Koenigs for reading and responding to many portions of the argument over the years.

Advice, instruction, and support have come from many quarters at several universities. At Yale University, I am grateful to David Bromwich, Jordan Brower, Ardis Butterfield, Alexis Chema, Maggie Deli, Merve Emre, Edgar Garcia, Langdon Hammer, Matt Hunter, David Kastan, Ed King, Angus Ledingham, Tessie Prakas, David Quint, Anthony Reed, Glyn Salton-Cox, Joe Stadolnik, Josh Stanley, and Ruth Yeazell. For their good company, intellectual and otherwise, at West Point, thanks go to Seth Herbst, Joe Mazzocchi, Matt Salyer, and Elizabeth Samet, as well as Dave Harper for his support as Department Chair. Thanks as well to my colleagues at the University of Oklahoma for their warm welcome. I am grateful to the community of Victorian scholars for their conversation and advice, including James Eli Adams, Tanya Agathocleous, Erik Gray, Michael Hansen, Elizabeth Helsinger, Gerhard Joseph, Charles LaPorte, Sebastian Lecourt, Meredith Martin, Andrew Miller, John Plotz, Yopie Prins, Jason Rudy, Jonah Siegel, Marion Thain, and Carolyn Williams. Special thanks go to Herbert Tucker and Jessica Feldman, my first teachers in Victorian literature during an MFA at the University of Virginia. The permanence of my interest in the field I owe to them.

I am grateful to the staff at the University of Virginia Press. The support and advice of Herbert Tucker and Andrew Stauffer helped guide the manuscript to its conclusion, and the two anonymous readers for the press provided generous feedback that proved essential to the book’s final form. Thanks go to Eric Brandt for shepherding me through the review process and to Nicholas Rich and Ellen Satrom for their advice during the preparation of the manuscript. Thanks as well to my copyeditor, Colleen Romick Clark, for her sharp-eyed and perspicacious reading of the manuscript.

This book has benefited from generous audiences at a number of conferences: the 2011 and 2012 North American Victorian Studies Association conferences, the 2012 Northeast Victorian Studies Association conference, the Politics of Form graduate conference at Columbia University in 2011, the Robert Browning and Victorian Poetry at 200 conference at the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, and the Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale Working Group conference in 2014. Many thanks to the organizers as well as to fellow panelists and audiences.

Part of chapter 1 appeared as Framing Tennyson’s Farewells: Authority and Materiality in ‘Morte d’Arthur’ in Victorian Poetry 51, no. 4 (2013): 487–509. It is reprinted here in revised and expanded form with permission from West Virginia University Press. Part of chapter 2 appeared as Dramatic Monologue, Public Address, and the Ends of Character in ELH 83, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 1135–58, copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press. It is reprinted with permission in expanded and revised form. The epigraph from W. B. Yeats’s The Statues in chapter 2 is from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, revised by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Two debts I cannot discharge. My advisor, Linda H. Peterson, passed away several years ago. She remains the most generous scholar and mentor I have known. Anyone who studied or worked with Linda knows that she enlarged our discipline—not only in scholarly and critical insight, but also in essential humanity. My mother, Francine Sider, also passed away just after I completed my dissertation. Her fierce intelligence and love of learning will always be guiding lights. Writing a book on parting words has not made it any easier to say goodbye. The voice of the dead was a living voice to me: Tennyson wrote often and well about the persistence of loved ones in memory. I am grateful for voices that linger.

I would like to thank my family for their endless support: my father, Richard Sider, whose pleasure in books and stories sparked my own; my brother, Josh, whose drive and thoughtfulness in his career as an Army officer continue to inspire; and my father- and mother-in-law, Stephen and Ann Galas, who have enlarged our family with their love and kindness.

Finally, this book is for Laura—like all my words, to the last.

Abbreviations

AP Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, edited by R. H. Super, 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77.

AL Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

SL A. C. Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–62.

P A. C. Swinburne, The Poems, 6 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1904–5.

SP Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems, rev. ed. New York: New Directions, 1990.

All quotations from poems are cited in the text by line number, with two exceptions. For poetry by Algernon Charles Swinburne, poems in the readily available Penguin Classics edition of Poems and Ballads & Atalanta in Calydon, edited by Kenneth Haynes, are cited as usual by line number. Poems drawn from the Chatto and Windus edition will be cited in text by the abbreviation P followed by volume and page number. Readers without access to the Chatto and Windus edition are encouraged to seek out the digital Algernon Charles Swinburne Project (http://swinburnearchive.indiana.edu/swinburne/), which hosts a fully searchable scan of this edition. Likewise, Ezra Pound’s Personae: The Shorter Poems is cited in the text as SP followed by the page number.

Parting Words

INTRODUCTION

Last Things First

As a mode of address, parting words suggest both an occasion for and a style of performance. Parting words are necessarily words that part, that separate speaker from addressee. They enact a break in order to solicit new terms of engagement. As the dramatic hero exits the stage or the politician rehearses his accomplishments in office, his performance is self-characterizing, self-authorizing: Set you down this, implores Othello, sword in hand, as he attempts in his final speech to overwrite the crimes of the last five acts.¹ From auf wiedersehen and arrivederci to the full-throated farewell speeches of tragic heroes, forsaken women, dying saints, or disgraced leaders, parting words locate in departure the possibility of another entrance. They contract new hearings under changed circumstances. As speakers take leave of their auditors, their performances manage problems of distance and relation: what have I been to you, and how will you know me when am I gone? As in the elegy, the answers to these questions set the terms by which an audience or community is to conceive of an absence: Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave (73), insists Alfred Tennyson’s Tithonus as he bids Aurora farewell and projects his own impossible demise.² Yet the speaker’s parting words produce not so much an ending as the penultimate moment before the end,³ a space in which to narrate the self and project that narrative into the future. They are a transaction not only between speaker and addressee, but also between economies of address, between the present scene of utterance and its future path of transmission.

This book shows how a singular fiction of address—the valedictory mode of the departing speaker—helped poets imagine forms of intimacy across the distances of Victorian mass culture. From the poetry of Tennyson to that of A. C. Swinburne, the valedictory may be found across a wide variety of verse genres, where it structures thinking about the publicness of poetic utterance. Valedictory speeches and scenes appear in or even constitute dramatic monologues, ballads, and lyric poems of all varieties, and they provide key moments of tragic or heroic self-appraisal in epics and verse-novels. In these poems, we find valedictory speakers pleading for release or understanding, pity or permanence. Their speeches rank among the most memorable and affecting scenes in Victorian literature: Ulysses standing on the shore, rallying his sailors for one last expedition into the West; Empedocles before his dive from the volcano’s edge into the cauldron, as he imagines that his being will spin out across time in elemental fire; or Sappho, perched on the Leucadian cliffs, promising her lover, Anactoria, that the poet’s songs will so enrapture the ages that men will strive against death for the sake of her immortality. In each case, a speaker’s departure becomes, paradoxically, a site of renewal. Each indulges a fantasy of circulation in which the speaker is passed on, into print or posterity, is taken up by others, becomes a public object or even a community.

The broad repetition and repurposing of the valedictory, particularly the intertextual echoes that ripple out from poems like Tennyson’s Ulysses and Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, form a history of generic recognition⁴ that places leave-taking at the heart of Victorian poetics. The importance of these scenes, I argue, lies with the role played by the valedictory in the way poets conceptualized poetic address in an emergent mass culture. The Romans described dying as ad plures ire—to go among the many. They meant that the deceased joins a company of the dead more extensive than the living. Ulysses, King Arthur, Paracelsus, St. John, Mycerinus, Sohrab, and Sappho—all the departing or dying speakers of Victorian poems go not into a timeless underworld but out into the strange and worldly rhythms of print circulation, where the many are the unknowable masses of the nineteenth-century reading public. The central movement of Parting Words may seem in some measure counterintuitive: to recover Victorian poets’ understanding of publicness will require that we consider how they imagine speakers and texts as leaving their addressees behind. This is not to endorse a typical narrative in which Victorian poetry disappears into aestheticist self-concern or lyric privacy.⁵ Rather, these valedictory poems perform through their farewells an engagement with the very publics they might appear to abandon. There is much of Victorian heroic resignation in these poems, yet the valedictory serves ultimately to reimagine poetic address in terms of the varieties of responsive understanding that such address solicits.⁶

The valedictory offered poets a way to comprehend and respond to the conditions of public culture governing their work and to think of their poems as a kind of public address, calibrated to the demands of the modern reading public. Whatever has seemed notably public about Victorian poetry has usually been located in its discursive investments: reflections on imperial strife or industrial capitalism, religious controversy or social causes. My argument diverges from such accounts by defining the relationship of poetry with public culture not in terms of topical discourse but instead through rhetorical stance—the way it projects a social world through poetic address and the kinds of imaginary presence that such address supposes. Title and subtitle, in other words—parting words and public address—are given equal weight in this volume. Attending to figurations of the public sphere in Victorian poetry, Parting Words explores the poetics of publicness: the forms, genres, and modes of address, the rhetorical possibilities, that poets reached for when they wanted to think about the problem of an expanding modern reading public.

The Victorian period saw the loss of faith in a unitary national public, yet it also resounded with a repeated injunction, uttered by critics, reviewers, and even poets themselves, that poetry address just such an audience. Indeed, Tennyson was the first English poet to find his writing burdened by reviewers with the demands of a national literary tradition, and he was variously encouraged and chastised for his relationship with the general reader.⁷ Writers in the period nonetheless faced an increasingly amorphous and variegated mass public—Arthur Henry Hallam called it that hydra,⁸ observing both its fractures and its fractiousness—coupled with the growing awareness of the publics for poetry as limited, unable to transpose themselves to the generality of the state.⁹ The demand for a public poetry, in the context of an emergent mass culture, produced in the poetics of the period a reciprocal focus on modes of address and the forms of relation that these modes promise.¹⁰ Across the following chapters, I argue that Victorian poets light on the valedictory not only as a way to address a public (as all poems printed and circulated in some sense do) but also to assert something about what it means to address a public in poetry in the middle of the nineteenth century. Through their figures of leave-taking, Victorian poets seek to comprehend the circulatory life of their poems, and their speakers imagine their exits as simultaneous entrances into the new, often highly mediated, modes of circulation through which these works broadcast their farewells.

In poems, novels, and essays, public lectures and parliamentary speeches, the valedictory offers speakers a way to arrange relations that they can no longer superintend, relations that exist in the essentially imaginative space between distant parties. In the spring of 1846, Sir Robert Peel, amid the ongoing famine in Ireland, led Parliament to repeal the Corn Laws. His break with the protectionist impulses of the Conservatives resulted in his loss of the party leadership, and he resigned on June 29, 1846. His peroration offers a study in the dynamics of valedictory rhetoric:

In relinquishing power, I shall leave a name, severely censured I fear by many who, on public grounds, deeply regret the severance of party ties—deeply regret that severance, not from interested or personal motives, but from the firm conviction that fidelity to party engagements—the existence and maintenance of a great party—constitutes a powerful instrument of government: I shall surrender power severely censured also, by others who, from no interested motive, adhere to the principle of protection, considering the maintenance of it to be essential to the welfare and interests of the country: I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist who, from less honorable motives, clamors for protection because it conduces to his own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labor, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.¹¹

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, Peel is reduced to a name, a metonym for the history of a self and career. Pitching his rhetoric into the optative, however, he imagines for himself a different significance and a broader, less intimate public, exchanging the immediate assurances of his relationship with an embodied audience of politicians for the contingencies of circulation as a cultural form among workers grateful for the changes that cost him the office of prime minister.

Peel may well have been thinking of Ulysses when he composed his valedictory speech. Tennyson had been given an annuity by the government in the fall of 1845, awarded by Peel himself. According to Hallam Tennyson, The question arose whether Sheridan Knowles or my father should be placed on the pension list. Peel knew nothing of either of them. Houghton [Richard Monckton Milnes] said that he then made Peel read ‘Ulysses,’ ‘whereupon the pension was granted to Tennyson.’¹² The ur-valedictory address of the Victorian era, Ulysses resounded with an assertion of power in the midst of loss and decline, and it found answering calls in poems across the next century. Indeed, Ulysses’s attempt to abscond from Ithaca and resume his wanderings has proven the archetypal valedictory address of Victorian literature, a clarion call of Onward! that sounds at times suspiciously like Retreat!

Like most valedictory speeches, Ulysses launches itself toward the future on the back of retrospective narrative. Tennyson’s hero has drunk Life to the lees (7) and become a part of all that [he] has met (18), but in describing his experience and having become a name (11), Ulysses reduces the self to a history of the self, burdened by his accomplishments and obligations. He prefers instead to reimagine experience as a prospect, an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move (19–21). Ulysses struggles for release from his history, from the famous name that binds him as the island of Ithaca binds him, and to dissolve that history in the future’s ever-receding horizon. By treating experience as a prospect, he is able to depart yet find himself waiting somewhere out ahead. The valedictory thrust of his speech, gathering the mythic hero out of his own past in order to place him once more in transit, requires that the poem redefine the relationship between speaker and addressee, the self and its contexts.¹³

For Victorian poets, I argue, the valedictory is the self- and other-defining mode of address par excellence and Ulysses its purest expression in nineteenth-century poetry, in part, because of the extravagance of its imaginative solution. All modes of address work to define the relationship between speaker and addressee, but valedictory speeches establish the terms of that relation under the pressure of imminent separation. As Ulysses’s valedictory rhetoric reaches its final crescendo, the hero exchanges the first-person singular, crushed by the heaped-up context that pains him in the first half of the monologue, for a plural subject he recruits out of thin air, the impossible mariners who suddenly rejoin him at the poem’s end: My mariners . . . you and I are old (45, 49). Suddenly he speaks not for himself alone but for his auditors as well:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (65–70)

The hero Ulysses disappears among the plural subject of the final lines much as the poem Ulysses will disappear among the plural subject that is the nineteenth-century reading public. The poem’s drive toward impersonality only increases its capacity to represent that subject, brought into being, like all publics, through the performative force of the speaker’s address. This dynamic also makes the valedictory a fraught scene of address: the success of our farewells as a particular sort of speech act is something that, departing, we cannot confirm. Suspended in a position of perpetual departure, Ulysses takes as its focus the central tension of the valedictory as such—between poetic closure and imaginative extension, between the need to make an end (22) and the desire to exceed or resist that ending.

Victorian poets were drawn to this kind of public rhetoric, with its curious admixture of elegy and optimism, and throughout this discussion, I track such language across a wide body of poetry.¹⁴ Thus the hills of England cry out to summon King Arthur back from Avalon in Tennyson’s The Epic (1842), and passersby in the wilderness are imagined to salute Sohrab’s graven tomb in Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (1853). Like Ulysses and Sir Robert Peel, both Arthur and Sohrab exchange in their departures the intimacy of embodied communication for a more complexly mediated relationship with a distant and anonymous public. Their publicness consists in the responses that they are capable of generating, as they are taken up by members of a public for purposes at once personal to each individual yet also in common with every other participant. Whether their publics might encompass England itself or are limited to a single passing horseman in the desert, each figure accedes to the uncertain fate faced by all cultural forms that circulate to a public. The valedictory is the crucial mediation of this difficulty in Victorian poetry. As Parting Words explores the forms of farewell that animated poetry in the mid-nineteenth century, it tells the story of how poets developed in the valedictory an idiom of publicness specific to their Victorian modernity.

A Sound Which Makes Us Linger

When Walter Benjamin asserted, Not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life . . . first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death, he was making explicit a principle of narrative self-fashioning that Victorian writers had found essential to their work.¹⁵ This transmissible or communicable self was a Victorian ideal that found expression in a parade of deathbed scenes in novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, in strategic reflections on past beliefs, selves, and certitudes by John Henry Newman and John Ruskin, and in the heroic farewell speeches of Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses and Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna. These scenes provide not only a subject but also a distinctive valedictory mode for Victorian writing—a mode by which authors and speakers assert the character of their lives or careers at these moments of departure. Explaining the history of his conversion to Roman Catholicism in Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), John Henry Cardinal Newman looks back on an article he published in the British Critic in April 1839, and he finds that it is in fact his valediction to the Anglican Church. His description of the article is telling: I have looked over it now, for the first time since it was published; and have been struck by it for this reason:—it contains the last words which I ever spoke as an Anglican to Anglicans. It may be read now as my parting address and valediction, made to my friends. I little knew it at the time. It reviews the actual state of things, and it ends by looking towards the future.¹⁶ That last line sums up the valedictory mode in a sentence: uniting a retrospective or elegiac gaze with a prospective or subjunctive finale, valedictory speakers find in each ending a new beginning and a new form of relation to their addressees.

Though the valedictory has never been defined as a distinct literary mode, two notable critical instances of the term valedictory will be helpful here.¹⁷ Both describe poets from the period in question, and taken together, they demonstrate the tensions inherent in the valedictory project—creating a self whose characteristic mode of address to the world is to abandon it.¹⁸ In his reading of Tennyson’s Tiresias (1885), Herbert Tucker describes the aging prophet’s speech as so patently valedictory, and so serenely self-serving.¹⁹ Tucker’s adjectives are mutually implicating. To be valedictory in this sense is to be nostalgic, veering toward self-congratulation and manipulating of one’s public image. This description suggests the apologetics of a kind of public relations work, as in the need of Tennyson’s aging prophet to imagine into monumental form his private desires, to substitute for a history of personal vision the permanence of civic memory:

O, therefore, that the unfulfilled desire,

The grief for ever born from griefs to be

The boundless yearning of the Prophet’s heart—

Could that stand forth, and like a statue, reared

To some great citizen, win all praise from all

Who past it, saying, That was he!

In vain! (78–83)

We might think, too, of Robert Browning’s Bishop, plotting out his tomb at St. Praxed’s and desperate for just the right stone and decoration to outdo his old rival Gandalf. Or of Christina Rossetti’s Remember (1862), as its injunction—Remember me when I am gone away (1)—ensures that the speaker’s lover really feels the imminent loss. If the valedictory is often a nostalgic mode, it is perhaps because, as Linda M. Austin writes, nostalgia in the Victorian period becomes a way of producing and consuming the past.²⁰ Valedictory speakers produce a past to be consumed—by an immediate audience, by a reading public, or even simply by themselves.

The second use of the term valedictory comes from Max Cavitch’s book on the history of American elegy, in which the author reflects on the way Whitman’s modes of address work to create bonds of obligation between writer and reader. As his poems entrust readers with the remembrance of their author, Whitman explores the possibility of mutuality across the mediated distance of the page. The short Calamus poem, To a Stranger (1860), concludes: I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, / I am to see to it that I do not lose you (9–10). Cavitch explains these lines by their way of parting: The valedictory charge is thrilling in the certainty with which it anticipates the fulfillment of an instant obligation—an obligation originating in nothing more than a fantasy of recognition and offered to the reader in an eroticized social spirit of generative mutuality.²¹ The word charge implies both an affective jolt created by the sheer assertiveness of the poem’s fantasy and a burden or responsibility leveled on the reader. In a related reading, Michael Warner sees the same poem as an invocation of intimacy that toys with the nonintimate, depersonalizing conventions of print publication.²² The valedictory is here the rhetorical form of an intimacy that acknowledges an intervening mediation, in this case, by verse and print. It is a form of address found everywhere in Whitman’s poetry: I stop some where waiting for you (247), he writes in the final line of Song of Myself (1855), knowing that we will find him again each time we pick up the book. Whitman’s withdrawals pick out the subjunctive force of the valedictory, its way of compelling these fantasies of recognition strung out along a timeline of future readings and receptions.

In a strict sense, the valedictory is more properly a mode than a genre.²³ Its thematic features and rhetorical patterns structure other more thoroughly conventional forms in both prose and verse. It may characterize the tone, affect, or situation of a given work, but only rarely does it stand on its own in the nominative. The poems discussed in this book would have been recognized by their Victorian readers first as instances of other forms and genres: epyllions, elegies, closet dramas, romances, ballades, epics, sonnets, and monodramas all make appearances in these pages. Some genres or literary topoi might also be described as always or primarily valedictory themselves, as, for example, with the deathbed scene.

Victorian critics reading valedictory poems certainly understood such verses as examples of a species. Two separate reviews of Robert Browning’s A Death in the Desert (1864), for instance, noted the conventionality of the utterance if not of the poem in question: It embodies the death of St. John in the Desert, [and] has the piquancy of making the beloved apostle reply with last words, wrote one reviewer, while another observed that the rigid strength of thought, the inexorable logic, the unerring force of will, have all the increased might that we sometimes see in the dying.²⁴ These reviewers recognized St. John’s last words as generic if not themselves constitutive of a verse genre. The sociologist Erving Goffman might describe them as one of the poem’s inner laminations, a recognizably conventional performance that nonetheless requires other layers of framing (by poem, page, and book) in order to tell us just what sort of status in the real world the activity has.²⁵ Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Problem of Speech Genres, would call these last words a primary speech genre located within a more complex secondary genre.²⁶ Thus, though best considered a mode itself, the valedictory may also be understood not only by its tone or occasion but also through the speech genres that it musters—the many farewells, apologies, and self-affirmations, every O, I die, Horatio, coordinated within valedictory speeches, poems, and essays.

What distinguishes the valedictory from other strains of elegiac writing? If elegies are poems about being left behind, valedictory poems are, by contrast, poems about leaving.²⁷ The valedictory encompasses a broad variety of leave-takings, from the amatory partings of the medieval alba or aubade to the much-anthologized last words of the Victorian deathbed to extended monologues by public figures as they retreat from the spotlight. In these pages, I use the term valedictory in several different ways, ways that are nonetheless interdependent. It applies first of all as a modal description that attaches to any number of literary genres when the texts in question are used as or characterized by a performance of leave-taking. More broadly, it indicates a tone that many readers will readily associate with the literature of the Victorian period—an admixture of resignation, defiance, self-recognition, and heroic failure that describes texts as various as John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, William Ernest Henley’s Invictus, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Christina Rossetti’s death-obsessed lyrics, Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and Alfred Tennyson’s dramatic monologues. Finally and most important, I treat the valedictory as a style of address, an orientation toward an audience that attempts to structure readers’ or auditors’ relationship to the departing speaker and, by extension, to the poem itself. Though they play a particularly prominent role in Victorian poetry, all these faces of the valedictory may be found, together or separately, in works throughout literary history.

The valedictory’s central place in verse writing may be explained quite simply: valedictory poems thematize the twin problems of closure and relation that tend to occupy poetry more generally. From classical verse to the poetry of our own moment, the valedictory’s pressurized pathos has added urgency to poetic address across a wide range of forms and genres, yet there is no unitary tradition of the valedictory poem.