Victorian Poetry

The world,” wrote Robert Browning, “is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”¹ Browning’s words insist on the enduring interest of the disowned objects of our encounters, but they also hint at the value of re- encounter itself: in his “Essay on Shelley” (1852), he urges his readers to repeated engagement with a world which— forlornly, conceitedly, at any rate unimaginatively— they think they know all too well. Browning’s point has lost nothing of its force to the passage of time, but it is still worth wondering why a Victorian audience in particular needed to hear it, and why it should have been a poet that made it. One of the things that distinguishes re- encounter from other varieties of repetition is its grounding in first- person experience, and hence its self- conscious temporal relation to past and prospective engagements with the same object: be it a person, place, thing, idea, or (as Browning’s metaphor suggests) a text. As such it may carry significant ethical implications, which might involve coming to see the world (and its constituents) as neither fully knowable nor casually disposable, and one’s own experience as vitally provisional. A re- encounter, to borrow a suggestive pairing of Stanley Cavell’s, is a way of both going back and going on.²

As the essays that follow reveal, there are many possible moods, styles, and methods of re- encounter. This special issue explores both how re- encounters are represented in Victorian poems and how structures of re- encounter shape the composition and reception of poetry in the period— through the dynamics of literary influence, the translation of earlier texts, the revision of manuscripts, and the creative reconstruction of tropes, myths, and images. Unsurprisingly, then, our chosen term often brushes up against others that bear certain family resemblances, including: representation, remediation, refashioning, recounting, revising, revisiting, revisioning, and recursion.³ Such attention lends weight to Rita Felski’s recent observation that “we shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.” ⁴ Our contributors offer us many different routes into the concept of re- encounter as a resource for thinking about [End Page 133] Victorian poetry and culture. While we have not been prescriptive about its definition, we nonetheless want to make a case for carefully scrutinizing our critical terms: all the following essays think hard about what makes “re- encounter” distinctive, as a structure of experience and as a critical idiom.

An example from one of the most well- known poems of the period gives a sense of the stakes and possibilities. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) pursues a re- encounter with a place hallowed by memory when the poet returns to Arthur Hallam’s house in Wimpole Street:

Dark house, by which once more I stand  Here in the long unlovely street,  Doors, where my heart was used to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more –  Behold me, for I cannot sleep,  And like a guilty thing I creepAt earliest morning to the door.⁵

The syntax of Tennyson’s lyric ambiguates between surveying and apostrophizing the physical objects re- encountered: the dark house and its barred doors. “Behold me” could be read as indicative (taking the house and the doors as the sentence’s subject), but it sounds more like an address, whose intended audience could be the reader, or Hallam, or perhaps even the house itself, along the lines of the classical genre of paraclausithyron (in which the excluded lover “addresses the door and holds it responsible for his rejection”).⁶ In this last case, the house’s unresponsiveness becomes an eerie figure for the devastating failure of the poet’s address to his departed friend. While Hallam’s gloomy abode might seem to share sympathetically in the colors of mourning, the poet finds himself disturbed by its vacancy: not only its emptiness...