concept of organic form, is seen as contributing to capitalism’s repressive ideological claims for the bourgeois subject’s autonomy, or as irresponsibly avoiding its own historical/social placement, Rossetti’s heroics of desire might seem a case in point. As Eagleton describes it, the concept of aesthetic autonomy, seen from what he calls a “radical political viewpoint,” is “disabling”:
It is not only . . . that art is thereby conveniently sequestered from all other social practices, to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. It is also, rather more subtly, that the idea of autonomy—of a mode of being which is entirely self-regulating and self-determining—provides the middle class with just the ideological model of subjectivity it requires for its material operations. (Eagleton, 9)
However, Rossetti, far from assuming the art object to be autonomous, recognizes and addresses the debt that all aesthetic productions owe to material (and market) forces. The Rossettian subject wins his distinction from such forces not by imaging himself as immune from the market and its ideologies, but rather because his very dependence upon the market compels him to become its critic.
A third chapter, “Murder in Utopia: William Morris and the Surface of Desire,” examines Morris’s writings on politics and design, his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, and his decorated manuscript, A Book of Verse. While Morris’s textile designs provide striking examples of complexly patterned surfaces, his poetry itself tends toward narration, evenness of meter, and regularity of rhyme, and thus, of all the poets discussed, he seems the least interested in the surfaces of language. The calligraphic and intricately ornamental poems of the 1870 A Book of Verse, however, by virtue of the exuberant ornamental work that spills into and around the texts of the poems, attract attention to their visual surfaces far more readily than they demand reading for narrative sense, and in this way, they provide a visual, as opposed to textual, model of “surface tension.” Furthermore, Morris’s work is theoretically invested in the political uses of the aesthetic surface. For Morris, beautiful surfaces in and of themselves carry affective and political purpose: encounters with beautiful objects create longings for more such encounters, igniting the intense desires necessary to motivate revolution. In addition, as Morris learned from Ruskin, surfaces of complex beauty reveal the individual hand that formed them, thus indicating the freedom of their maker.
And yet, while Morris embraces a revolutionary, or even apocalyptic temporality, and claims a direct correlation between the aesthetic surface and revolutionary change, as we see in News from Nowhere, the aftermath of revolution is not for him the end of all desires, but rather desire’s perpetuation. Desire is not only necessary for the advent of revolution, it is also the crucial antidote to the boredom that Utopia threatens. This politico-aesthetic celebration of desire is reflected in the dense surfaces of Morris’s illuminated texts. In my reading of a key example of these texts I examine how the illustrative surface serves to delay or obscure readability, producing in the reader a state of suspended expectation not unlike that experienced by the various characters of News from Nowhere. For in that novel, while the revolution brings rest from what Morris called “meaningless toil,” it cannot do away with the energetic striving that constitutes “meaningful work,” and which adds texture to what might otherwise be a flat existence. And yet, the violent desires that Morris invents for the characters of News from Nowhere suggest that the meeting of rest and desire is not, in Morris’s political or aesthetic theory, easily achieved.
But if Morris’s work taxes the aesthetic with balancing the affective and political need for striving with the social and personal need for rest, then the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins charges aesthetic production with an even more epic task. In Hopkins’s particular approach to Christian eschatology, all the variegated, interwoven, and intense sensations of the present moment are not barriers to redemption’s temporal transcendence; rather sensation, and especially the visual sensations offered by the natural world, when deeply experienced, provide direct access to God. Poetry engages these complex surfaces, which Hopkins called “inscape,” but is also itself an example of such inscape, and thus, for Hopkins at his most optimistic, the poem, especially the difficult poem, is a direct portal to the eternal. Hopkins’s work therefore most clearly demonstrates the way in which the poetry of surface tension assumes the highly wrought aesthetic object as a vehicle for sudden and absolute transformation, even though for Hopkins this transformation is theological (a conversion) rather than political. Hopkins’s theological position, which is also an aesthetic position, is thus homologous to the aesthetic socialism of Morris and to the individualism of Rossetti, though these poets imagine different outcomes for the transformations they assert.
In my final chapter, “Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Reck of the Moment,” I turn not just to Hopkins, but also to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the relationship between Hopkins’s staging of temporality discussed above and his early reception. Throughout a century of writings on Hopkins we find a persistent effort to position him as “timeless,” as fully belonging neither to his moment nor to modernism, but instead to the timeless moment of the perpetual present. Hopkins evades periodization in part because of the history of his publication, but also because his poetry is at once thoroughly modern in its embrace of the fleeting and intense present and thoroughly traditional in its commitment to Christianity. I argue that the tension in Hopkins’s work between such investments in present-time sensation and evocations of the Apocalypse lead to a tendency toward messianism in his critics. xxvii
And yet, I also argue that the messianic strain of Hopkins’s criticism is in no way unique in twentieth and even twenty-first century criticism and poetics. Thus, in the book’s coda, I turn to examples of contemporary North American poetics that similarly bestow a messianic power on the complex surfaces of the poem. These critics and poets, like the Victorians I study, seek to find in “difficult” poetry a pathway toward, or indication of, radical social or psychic transformations. This secular messianic poetics tends to identify its origins in Frankfurt School theories about the relationship between aesthetic productions and social change. It does not however tend to recognize its close ties to nineteenth-century aestheticism and to Victorian temporality. This book locates this impulse historically, acknowledging and rebalancing the debt we still owe to Victorian poetry.
Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion” is at once about temporal stasis and about the potential failure of language to mean outside of itself. The static and suffocating scene the poet encounters within the muse’s mind speaks directly against the hope that poetic language might hold a redemptive futurity behind its veil-like surfaces. And yet, those nineteenth-century poets who responded to Keats as their most important guide seem, like the flaring figure of Hyperion himself, energized, rather than deflated, by the challenge of Keatsian doubt as they take surface complexity as the first step toward a liberated and liberating poetics. These late Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Thus, this book contends that late Victorian poetry, even when least explicitly political, yields new understandings of how poets engaged, and often re-envisioned, the period’s pressing concerns about social progress, decadence, and revolution.
CHAPTER I
MATHEW ARNOLD’S PREGNANT POETRY
[T]he Kantian “without interest” must be shadowed by the wildest interest, and there is much to be said for the idea that the dignity of artworks depends on the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested. . . .Art does not come to rest in disinterestedness. For disinterestedness immanently reproduces—and transforms interest . . . For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art.
Theodor Adorno xxviii
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
Matthew
