The Finest Verbalism of Victorian Poetry

School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics & Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies

A One-day Workshop – 10 March 2007 9.30am-5.00pm

The Finest Verbalism of Victorian Poetry

'To me, Tennyson shows more than any poet I know (perhaps has been a warning to me) how much there is in finest verbalism. There is such a latent charm in mere words, cunning collocutions, and in the voice ringing them, which he has caught and brought out, beyond all others—as in the line,
And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight’

Walt Whitman was both appreciative and wary of the charms of Tennyson's 'finest verbalism', and critics have begun to think again about the pleasures and pitfalls of verbalism in the poetry of Tennyson and his Victorian contemporaries. This has meant a renewed exploration of critical approaches attentive to language, metre and poetic form, and which take seriously the poetry of an age preoccupied with both the ethics of the aesthetic and its practice. This emphasis on close reading complements the topics that a historicised Victorian Studies has introduced in the last few decades. A criticism attentive to verbalism asks readers of Victorian poetry to reconsider not only what poems are saying, but how they say it, and the implications for their content.

This workshop will create a forum for debating how verbalism illuminates and complicates the content of Victorian poems. Can we read Victorian history through the history of the language of Victorian poems? How can a sophisticated sense of literary as well as of political history be brought to the challenges of reading the enlarged canon? What are the ethical and political limits of such approaches? How legitimate are questions of quality?

The structure of the day will be informal, combining papers, panels and open discussion. We hope the workshop may lead to a larger conference and/or essay collection.

Speakers: Sylvia Adamson, Derek Attridge, Matthew Bevis, Kirstie Blair, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Jonathan Ellis, Peter Howarth, Angela Leighton, Daniel Karlin, Francis O’Gorman, Seamus Perry, Michael Sanders, Jane Wright, and John Woolford

Cost: £10, or £5 for postgraduates/unwaged. Please make cheques payable to the University of Sheffield, and send by Friday 3 March to: Matthew Campbell, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Sir William Empson House, 6-8 Shearwood Road, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN.

Organisers: Matthew Campbell (m.campbell@sheffield.ac.uk) and Samantha Matthews (samantha.matthews@sheffield.ac.uk).

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