Is the "It" in "Make It New"
Victorianism?
Session Organizer: Linda Pratt
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
202 Andrews Hall, Department of English
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
lpratt1@unl.edu
Metaphor at the Fin de Siecle: Yeats’s Altering Eye
As early as the 1880s Yeats began to use metaphor in a way that signals its changing function in modernist poetry. Distressed by the materialism of his late Victorian world in which a positivist reality seemed to prevail, Yeats sought in poetry a way in which to create “mental realities” that science could not measure but which had more substance than the elaborated artifice of Decadent aesthetics. Poetic words could be a “pearly brotherhood” or “inarticulate moan.” Influenced by Pre-Raphaelites and surrounded by Decadents, Yeats developed an idea of metaphor that was neither mimetic nor narcissist. His metaphors attempt to reintegrate history with imagination. His poem “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” declares the failure of the old aestheticism and the new materialism and attempts to assign to metaphor the task of creating “stylistic arrangements of experience.”
Linda Pratt
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
lpratt1@unl.edu
Victorian Beauty, Modernist Aesthetics, and Evelyn Waugh’s Indictments
Evelyn Waugh’s career showed a reckless willingness to eviscerate in public much of what the cognoscenti valued most. As he wrote of a character based on himself in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, “his strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.” For Waugh, rejecting modernist aesthetics, especially the artist’s desire to live for art alone, was centrally important to his own formulations of the modernist novel. However, while giving up Picasso and jazz posed him no real difficulties, giving up PreRaphaelite beauty posed a problem of a different order. This paper will argue that since, as Michael Bell writes, “Modernist mythopoeia characteristically functions under [the] aesthetic sign” (243), Waugh found himself ultimately unable to support beauty’s central place in his art because he found an ineradicable link between the beautiful art of the PreRaphaelites and the modernist aesthetics of such figures as Pound, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Yeats.
Laura White
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
lwhite4@unl.edu
Hopkins the Victorian, Hopkins the Modern
In the past two decades critics have explored the deep embeddedness of Victorian antecedents within Edwardian and modernist literary endeavors, tracing the indebtedness of Yeats, Pound, H. D., Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Woolf to the works of Browning, Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Morris and other Victorians,. In so doing, they have disproved once again Virginia Woolf's proud claim in a lecture to the Cambridge Heretics Society, "On or about 1910 human character changed."
One line of influence has perhaps received less attention than its importance would merit, however--the extent to which twentieth century poets modelled some of their most distinctive techniques and perceptions on the work of an obscure Jesuit priest whose collected poems were published in rough form in 1912, long after his death. This paper will suggest the forms taken by just a few of Hopkins' poetic reincarnations in the twentieth century--in the poems of Thomas Hardy, C. D. Lewis, Edith Sitwell, Ruth Pitter, and Dylan Thomas, and the poetic prose experiments of Woolf and Grassic Gibbon. It will ask why Hopkins, of all the Victorians, seemed preternaturally "modern" to his successors, how his poetry may have influenced the critical canons which shaped early and mid-twentieth century British poetics, and which aspects of his legacy were silently distorted or transfigured by these modernist reincarnations.
Florence Boos
University of Iowa
florence-boos@uiowa.edu