Making Christ: Alice Meynell, Poetry, and the Eucharist

We too (one cried), we too, We the unready, the perplexed, the cold, Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew, Cherish, possess, enfold. --"To the Mother of Christ The Son of Man" Alice Meynell, whose poetry is seldom read or anthologized today, eighty years after her death, was so venerated by her contemporaries that she was on two occasions suggested for Poet Laureate. In an almost hagiographical address to the Royal Society of Literature in 1914, Sir Henry Newbolt compared Meynell's verse to that of the Metaphysicals, declaring it conveyed "a union of wit and religious emotion as rare now as it was characteristic of the seventeenth century in England" (qtd. in Badeni 227). Sir Henry's attempt to categorize Meynell's remarkable, slender, disciplined verses has been duplicated by many other admiring but somewhat puzzled critics. Sir Henry was not the only one to suggest that Meynell's poems belonged in centuries past; her friend and admirer G. K. Chesterton stated that she "differed from most of the advanced artists of the period in the detail that she was facing the other way, and advancing in the opposite direction" (11). After decades of undue neglect, a small number of literary critics have recently turned to Meynell's condensed and witty poetry, and, again, their reevaluations have investigated the puzzle of forebears and of "locating" this Victorian who is not entirely a Victorian. Vanessa Furse Jackson allies herself with Chesterton and Sir Henry in noting the seventeenth-century influence on Meynell; Sharon Smulders has traced Meynell's debt to the Romantics. In a recent volume on female aestheticism, Talia Schaffer makes a persuasive case for reading Meynell's essays as significantly contributing to the artistic movement of the fin de siecle. Maria Frawley reads Meynell's verse as modernist, foregrounding issues of identity and cognition. Part of Meynell's challenge as a poet is that she straddles traditions that to our modern eyes appear incompatible. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, in their volume on Victorian women poets, judge Meynell's political and lyrical activities to be quite distinct from one another: "In spite of her political and journalistic activity, Meynell's poetry remains largely personal and lyrical" (510). Schaffer is even more explicit about the split she sees in Meynell as artist: "Alice Meynell managed, though at some psychological cost, to be both an Angel in the House and a suffragist" (32). While Schaffer claims Meynell as an aesthete and avant-garde experimentalist, Smulders, who also sees Meynell as negotiating with ideological incompatibilities, defines those elements very differently. Taking up Chesterton's description of Meynell as "a Radical in her opinions and a Tory in her tastes" (7), Smulders argues that Meynell's political radicalism, as expressed in her war poetry, is complicated by her conservative traditionalism in religion and poetic style. We owe these scholars a considerable debt for reopening the critical discussion of a complicated artist and for provocatively directing us to the creative complexities of her poetry. I seek to contribute to the recuperation and reevaluation of Meynell's verse by suggesting that the periodizing effort related to her artistic "incompatibilities" may actually help create the limitations and divisions it studies. My aim is to argue for the fundamental coherence of Meynell's style, faith, and feminism. Thus, while Smulders has suggestively highlighted Meynell's use of a transmutational trope ("Feminism" 172-74), I take up that insight but look beyond the overtly political verse to that which may seem most "traditional" and inimical to feminism--Meynell's poems exploring the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism. Her ongoing engagement with issues of creativity and artistic legacies may be illuminated more fully through an examination of its foundation: belief in a Christian God, adherence to the traditions of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and reverence for the divine capacity of the Word. …