The Parted Voice: Polyvocal Utterance in Victorian Elegies

Abstract

This study of Victorian elegies examines elegies that divide the voice of the mourner not only as to express utterances of sorrow, but also to assert poetic authority, to navigate collective loss, and respond to historical changes in poetic reception over the nineteenth century. Bringing together formalist and historicist approaches, its close readings trace Victorian experiments with the recovery of voice in the wake of loss in the poetry of Letitia Landon, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Howard argues that the resonance of many voices in Victorian elegies underscores a paratactic, eclectic approach to the recovery of voice, in which repurposing, echoing, and call-and-response structures underscore the range of Victorian experiments to express grief and showcase how elegies in the nineteenth century engaged other genres, including ballads, dramatic lyrics, sonnet cycles, and odes. Howard demonstrates that the division or multiplication of voices in Victorian elegies sheds new light on the changing relationship between perceptions of poetic authority and increasingly diverse audiences over the Victorian period as well as the influence of routes of print circulation in the periodical and the rising popularity of poetic elocution and recitation on both the composition and reception of elegies.