The long poem and its ends, 1797-1869
Keywords: narrative
Browning
Tennyson
Wordsworth
organicism
Barrett Browning
long poem
Coleridge

This is a study of five major English poets and the approaches they took to the long poem in the period 1797-1869. I argue for an ambivalence in these works about the very ends of length itself. These poems give various reasons for being long and come to question the very notion of progress towards a final goal. As a result, the long poem of this era develops a suspicion of its own possibility for definitive development.
The introduction covers some of the ways that long poems have been discussed in the context of other genres. I propose, by contrast, to investigate the ways in which some of the poems in this formal category attempt to theorise themselves: to explain what their ends are, in other words. I frame this in terms of the classical formal and narratological accounts of ended- ness, as well as the Romantic-era organic analogies from which many of them derive. In any case, I argue, the long poems of this Romantic and Victorian moment do not fit our received notions of the end. In fact, in trying to work out what they are for, these poems all interrogate the functions of literary purpose and development more broadly, and it is specific manifestations of that problem which I undertake to describe in the following chapters.
In the first chapter, Coleridge’s thought helps explain the premises outlined in the introduction. Coleridge’s lifelong preoccupation with parts and wholes, means and ends, is shown to emerge in the practical case of the long poem and in shorter works that he himself wrote. After following this through readings of his early criticism, ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, and his poem ‘To William Wordsworth’, I suggest the ways in which his definitions of poetry, including the famous but often misread comment that ‘a poem of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry’ respond to the same intellectual stimulus. To finish, his ideas of method, symbol, and constitution are explored in turn as they reveal an illustrative balance between the endless and the strictly determined.
The subsequent chapters analyse Wordsworth, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning. For Wordsworth, my chapter covers the poems written towards The Recluse. I show that an ambivalence around ends preceded the idea of The Recluse, and then investigate the ways in which the notion (and impossibility) of writing a master poem became a theme of those poems themselves. Through a reading of Wordsworth’s river imagery, and the use of enjambment in The Excursion, I demonstrate the ways in which endlessness is figured as both benevolent or restrictive. In the second chapter, Tennyson’s In Memoriam is closely read, along with several earlier lyrics, to reveal a lyric practice which prevents In Memoriam from achieving a true progression from one section to the next. My focus is on the unusual tenses which Tennyson utilises to talk about past and recurring events.
The chapters on Robert and Elizabeth Browning see how the discussion of formal means and ends apply to the diversity and telos of a liberal society. In Aurora Leigh, I argue, an eccentric individualism is developed in order that individualism might be overcome. With this motion, however, the grounds of poetry seem undercut, as if the end of this long poem threatens the end of subjective poetry itself. The Ring and the Book, subject of my final chapter, is shown to continuously make allegories of itself, its excessive length and digressiveness. The ideas of writing a long poem because you have to, and simply because you can, take a political dimension in Browning’s poem. Human eloquence is shown to have a momentum all of its own beyond its ambitions of speaking truly.
The thesis concludes with a short meditation on the methodological problems of reading long poems, and on the development of the form in American poetry.