misery. For Newman, sacrifices and grand gestures thus needed to be brought inside the orbit of Christian morality, and poetry—a term which he uses interchangeably with tragedy in this essay—is the medium through which the otherworldly can be imagined. As Newman states, poetry “provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life; and becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotions of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give.”40 The connection that he repeatedly draws in the essay between poetry and a form of understanding not available in earthly existence proves to be a twofold contradiction: Newman proposes that poetry captures the essence of the afterlife but also that it is still necessary to impose the afterlife on a tragic work to instill “right moral feeling.” He thereby ushers all tragedies into a realm where earthly time is of no account, for in Newman’s essay all tragedies properly end in the afterlife (whether they do so explicitly or by benefit of the reader’s framing agency). Grand finales are dissolved into a continuing narrative that concludes in the indefinite hereafter, and individual acts of closure—especially those that are doomed, tragic, and without “solace”—are obliterated by being subsumed into an ending that parousia alone can provide. Newman’s position can consequently be viewed as the inverse of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of action and ethics in Greek tragedy. In Arendt’s reading, actions have force because they occur in the absence of otherworldly retribution and reward, an essentially existentialist point of view.41
But if Newman diminishes the importance of death and closure in any given tragedy, it is not to privilege the “every-day” as the repository of meaning. Realism was never Newman’s main interest either as a theologian or as a novelist. “Why interrupt so transcendent a display of poetical genius by inquiries degrading it to the level of every-day events, and implying incompleteness in the action till a catastrophe arrives?” he asks.42 What, then, is Newman privileging in place of action if not the lulls of prosaic description? The simple answer would be lulls of a more transcendent nature—the lulls of an afterlife where action, in some form, “outlives” the catastrophe of death. It is no accident that in presenting his favored aspects of Greek tragedy, Newman speaks of “characters, sentiments, and diction,” making the subtle choice of distinguishing “characters” from “sentiments.” Newman’s afterlife is one in which the world of “sentiments” continues past death and past, however contradictorily, the world of the senses. These disembodied sentiments, although passively framed, are the highest form of action for Newman. Death, consequently, is only the end of one kind of action—physical action—and in his essay the most affecting movements in a drama are not feats and the final “act” of dying but instead come from extending final moments into an indefinite lull, an intermediate state of existence.
If the essay on the Poetics accomplishes any central goal, it is to privilege poetry, and specifically, poetic suspension, as the means through which to understand slow changes that underlie dramatic turning points. The essay comes as a discursive rally against representing change through purely discursive means, for Newman urges that poetry can give readers access to understanding the afterlife in ways that are unavailable in sermons and tracts. It is no surprise, then, that later in his career Newman avails himself of poetry to explain his own model of the afterlife. In the case of Newman’s Dream, his chosen poetic form allows him to accomplish something that proved out of reach in Tract 90; a quarter of a century after Tract 90, Newman turned to a new form that could allow him to explain and, moreover, to perform the eschatological conundrums he had previously discussed in tract form. Eschewing the purely explanatory (not to mention inflammatory) nature of the tract, Newman instead turned to devotional poetry. In taking a new, lyrical approach to the subject matter, he chose a poetic model that borrowed from both the circularity of liturgy and the suspended quality of dramatic monologues, thereby achieving a difficult balance between foregrounding Catholic concerns over death and the afterlife while still generating greater reader receptivity in his use of the soliloquy.
II. Victorians in Purgatory: The Dream of Gerontius and Poetic Conciliation
Although The Dream of Gerontius is fabled for finding its way into the hands of men of action like General Gordon, the poem imagines change as the product of radical inaction, the result of bodiless contemplation occurring in a sensory deprivation chamber. As the poem in recent times is rarely considered outside of its theological and religious-historical interest, it has been bypassed by a contemporary tradition of literary scholarship focusing on the political work of Victorian poetry. Newman’s prose is often included in considerations of the relation between poetry and politics, such as Isobel Armstrong’s seminal Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, which discusses how Newman’s sermons and tracts illuminate the political concerns of poets such as Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold, but his poetry is overlooked in such studies.43 Despite The Dream’s many potential critical points of interest—including the lingering mystery of its success, its controversial content, and the political turnaround it helped achieve—Newman’s most popular poem has received little literary critical attention in our time. As a result, its popularity has yet to be addressed as a phenomenon firmly enmeshed in his poetics.
To understand Newman’s success in The Dream, we must bring the poem into current conversations about the long Victorian poem that rely on narrative theory, from which it has been absent, including recent work on dramatic monologues, explorations of lyric versus narrative modes, and studies of Victorian experimentation with hybrid genres. This approach is embodied by scholars such as Monique Morgan, whose recent work provides a model for the kind of scholarship on the long Victorian poem that could yield new insights into Newman’s approach in The Dream.44 Indeed, The Dream is a worthy example for deeper study given the unusual narrative methods Newman employs to capture individual change over a substantial poetic duration. Considered alongside other long poems of the period, notably Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the work with which it is most frequently compared, The Dream differs radically in its vision of a central speaker’s development.45 In Memoriam is oriented around a central figure whose anguished doubt gives the poem its vital trajectory and intimacy. For example, many passages are devoted to the urgent questioning of Hallam’s existence after death and the possibility for future development.46 In contrast, in Newman’s vision of purgatory, Gerontius’s salvation is ensured upon his entering the realm of Judgment. As a result, his journey is not one from doubt to increasing faith, for he instead undergoes a central process of dispossession of selfhood and the cleansing of self-interest. To put it slightly differently: the poem as a whole is not about personhood but about process, about conversion, not the convert. And just as the speaker’s musings vary from those of Tennyson in In Memoriam, so too does the poetic form in which these musings take shape. The certainty of an afterlife that opens the poem marks an important distinction—a distinction that plays out on a formal level in The Dream. To capture his vision of conversion, Newman undermines a Tennysonian emphasis on the lyrical “I,” found in both the epic melancholia of In Memoriam and Victorian dramatic monologues, borrowing instead from the suspension of liturgy.
This reading of The Dream as a poem that uniquely partakes of liturgy is necessarily situated in the context of poetics movements of the time, notably, the turn toward ritualism in the 1860s. As I contend, The Dream may be understood as part of a renewed interest in ritualism, but it is also something more. In brief, the poem is evidence of Newman’s ability to navigate the shifting terrain of the 1860s and to make death-consolation literature the site of his own brand of subversive orthodoxy. It exemplifies Newman’s ability to craft what I term a “poetics of conciliation,” or a poetic form that accommodates Catholic liturgy and secular verse, as well as formal paradoxes including temporal suspension and narrative progression, sensory description and portrayals of disembodiment. In its interplay between quoted Catholic ritual and soliloquies, The Dream invokes ritual in ways more explicit, and potentially more off-putting, than were pursued by other popular devotional poets of his time, notably, Anglo-Catholic devotional poets such as Christina Rossetti, for Newman quotes directly and at length from rites performed in the Roman Catholic mass. At the same time, he also partakes
