Robert Browning’s Homesickness
Robert Browning's "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" is conventionally known as one of the most patriotic poems in the English language. Although the poem in its original print context is the first of three dramatic monologues, it is invariably seen in popular British culture, as well as in the history of its print circulation in the nineteenth century, as a stand-alone lyric poem celebrating the best of English nationhood. The poem has attracted surprisingly little attention from critics, perhaps because of difficulty with placing its apparent expression of English nationalism within the context of Browning's more uneasy investigations of the construction of nationhood and of cosmopolitanism. This essay argues that "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" is a deceptively simple poem that in fact interrogates the very patriotism it has been taken to celebrate. Furthermore, the poem is an important part of Browning's experimentation with the dramatic lyric form, and particularly the concept of voice in relation to proximity and distance. "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" reveals the importance of reading Browning's poems as expressive and interrogative at the very same time. In addition, the complex hybrid genre adopted in the poem participates in nineteenth-century discussions about the relation between England and Europe, in a way that recalls Mary Louise Pratt's concept of "contact zones," over-determined social spaces where cultures encounter one another, and jostle for position, often within asymmetrical and complex power structures. The poem's fundamental dynamic between home and the foreign suggests the importance of border crossing, a movement within and between contact zones, across frontiers and boundaries that are geographical, cultural, political and textual: a movement that, I argue, structures the very concept of the lyric poet itself, always a vital concern for Browning. In a recent and hugely popular endeavor by the British Broadcasting Corporation to record major poems by famous actors, the actor Geoffrey Palmer reads "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" with music playing softly in the background. (1) The choice of the Largo section (second movement) of Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony is important, especially to British ears, because it cites a previous and famous use of this section as the soundtrack (arranged for brass band) to a series of well-known television advertisements for Hovis bread, directed by Ridley Scott, and much replayed. The Hovis advertisement was voted in 2006 the most-loved advertisement in Britain, for the nostalgic portrayal of a northern town with a small boy pushing a bike up cobbled streets and carrying loaves of Hovis, associating the packaged bread with what is quintessentially English. (2) In fact, the popular commercial Classic FM station in Britain reported that it was inundated with requests for the "Hovis music," originally composed to commemorate the discovery of the Americas (see Byrne). It might seem peculiar to associate Robert Browning with a loaf of brown bread. But the BBC recitation of "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" chose a canny patriotic soundtrack. Subtitled "The greatest poems, the finest voices, glorious music," the "Words for You" series of recited poems can be purchased as a CD and seen on YouTube (where it has its own TV channel)) Palmer is perhaps at first glance an unlikely choice, known for his deadpan humor and stuffy, middle-class buffoonery, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, in portrayals of such popular British sit-com characters as Reggie Perrin's brother-in-law in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and the phlegmatic husband in Butterflies. (4) But Browning's poem suits such an actor perfectly, for like all Browning's dramatic lyrics, "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad" is in fact supremely ironic. In the nineteenth century, the poem was seen as a quintessential expression of English patriotism. It was reprinted, for example, in Mary Isabella Lovejoy's Poetry of the Seasons anthology of 1898 as exemplary of spring. …
Last Things: Emily Brontë's Poems
Introduction: And First 1. Last Things 2. Fathoming 'Remembrance' 3. Outcomes and Endings 4. Fragments 5. The First Last Thing 6. Posthumous Bronte
Period Pains: The Changing Body of Victorian Poetry
THE BIGGEST SINGLE CHANGE TO THE BODY OF VICTORIAN POETRY IN THE LAST fifteen years has come from the long overdue restoration of women poets to the canon. So profound and far-reaching are the implications of this change that the subject can never again be viewed as it was during most of the twentieth century. The subject itself has metamorphosed, it has grown up, it has gone through its menarche. My student years in the 1960s, first in Australia and then at Oxford, saw Victorian poetry defined as a syllabus and therefore as a subject almost entirely within the parameters of men's poetry: Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold being the big three, variously accompanied by Hopkins, Swinburne, Hardy, D.G. Rossetti, and Morris: Christina Rossetti was sometimes allowed a modest peep through the door. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was mentioned, disparaged, and set aside. How much has changed! There is now so much interest in the work of women poets from younger Victorian scholars that they almost threaten to swamp the men. To me, this represents a huge upheaval in the subject, a radical transformation in what it is that we are dealing with when we speak of "Victorian Poetry." For it is not just an addition of women, it is a transformation of the men too, when they are seen in the context of the women. The impact of the upheaval in the body of Victorian poetry caused by such recent recognition of women poets will continue to have multiple ripple effects for decades to come. And in the wake of the women has come the recognition of the gays and queers, in a way closely echoing recent changes in western cultural mores. In the wake of feminism came the quest for gay liberation, and in the wake of feminist studies came cultural studies, which was soon to be fuelled by a feeling of exclusion in certain quarters from the women-only agenda of early feminism. (1) Later, gay and lesbian studies were followed by the rise of queer theory, and debates sprang up about the interrelation of all of these trends. However, I cannot agree with Hartman that queer theory has rendered gender conceptually redundant; (2) debates around queer theory grew out of debates around gender issues and cannot be separated from them, as the work of Judith Butler, "Queen of Queer," has so eloquently shown. (3) The queering of Victorian poetry is probably long overdue. And what next? Perhaps a new push toward re-opening religious debates from a new knowledge base and a newly sensitized perspective which seeks somehow to put the religion back into the poetry. (4) Alongside these changes has come an increased impatience with the confinement or shaping of the body of what we have known as Victorian poetry entirely according to the years of a single monarch's reign. As Isobel Armstrong has eloquently put it, "in addition to being a purely descriptive historical marker [the term Victorian] can be an insidiously homogenising and deeply unhistorical term, encouraging the search for some quintessentially Victorian ethos." (5) Increasing emphasis is being placed on the "long nineteenth century" as a way of dissociating the cultural production of a period with the perceived limiting characteristics of notions of Victorianism deriving from the figure of Queen Victoria, and of expanding the cutoff points for the period so as to encourage a new focus on a wider timespan as historical context. Perhaps it is no more than nostalgia, but my view is that "Victorian" is too valuable an epithet to lose--it allows us to place the cultural production of the period into a certain perspective that, despite its evident limitations, continues to gather richness even as it recedes into the past. Of course, it has been changed since the turn of the millenium by suddenly pushing it back a century. When I began my studies in the Victorian period, it carried with it a feeling of being too close to the present for a true perspective--undervalued because not "historical enough"--just as for years, Victorian architecture was snobbily devalued against Georgian (Victorian as vulgar, Georgian as classical). …