Victorian poetry as sacred scripture: Poetic ambition from Tennyson to George Eliot.

Abstract

This dissertation examines Victorian poetic ambition in light of contemporary Biblical criticism, especially the German higher criticism. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century proponents of the higher criticism often used poetic to describe the Bible's literary and historical character, so as to distinguish it from history proper. This poetic view of the Bible, in turn, inspired Victorian poets by implying that other poetry might assume a religious function and a cultural weight analogous to the Bible's. Achieving this function became a driving ambition for many English poets during the middle of the nineteenth century. My four main chapters show how four mid-century poets variously embraced the charge of augmenting the sacred literature of their culture. Tennyson's <italic> Idylls of the King</italic> traces the kinship between the Christian scriptures and the British poetic legacy so as to reconcile readers to the inspiration of both. Browning's <italic>The Ring and the Book</italic> dramatically inscribes itself into that British poetic legacy by means of hagiographical models that apply both to Browning's characters and to his own public life. Clough's <italic> Dipsychus</italic> imagines itself as a poetic substitute for the Bible before dismissing itself as a flawed byproduct of the Biblical culture that it would supplant and correct. And, finally, George Eliot's <italic>The Legend of Jubal </italic> builds upon the higher critics' notion of scripture by intimating that sentimental women's verse could do more than other modern literary forms to propagate the sacred truths of post-Christian humanism. The ambitions of mid-century poets such as these powerfully shaped subsequent literary culture by helping to create the vibrant atmosphere in which the professional study of English could arise toward the end of the century. I conclude with brief studies of William Morris, Mathilde Blind, and Constance Naden to demonstrate that the zeal of Victorian poetic bibliolatry in many cases outlives even devotion to the Bible itself.