Line by line

This dissertation follows the efforts of four nineteenth-century British poets to form and reform ways of reading. The poets I have selected--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins--variously emphasized the ethical, religious, and metaphysical consequences of readers' responses to detailed features of their poetry, from its rhythms to its material presentations. They believed that subtle dynamics in a reader's experience could reform unethical habits of sympathetic pleasure (Wordsworth); encourage or forfeit free will (Coleridge); invite participation in a communion of saints (Rossetti); or produce an intimation of divine grace (Hopkins). As a result, each was sensitive to associations that their poetry might awaken, such as the expectations excited by meter in upper middle-class readers at the turn of the century or the values attached to the sonnet by its late Victorian cultivation. Treating their poems both as authorial strategies and instances of reception, I identify overlooked connections and tensions between their aims in revising reading, the forms of their poetry, and the reading practices and responses of nineteenth-century audiences. Rather than encouraging idealistic dismissal of the contingencies of reception, I argue, these poets' attempts to influence readers' responses made them sensitive to the uncertainties and historical constraints of writing and reading, and very often confronted them with contradictions in the motives, views of reading, and beliefs that drove their writing. My approach is historical and contextual, but I reject the idea that poems are artifacts decipherable only in terms of reconstructed authorial designs, distant contexts of reception, and forgotten habits of reading. To challenge this notion, I analyze recent readings of the poems I discuss for critics' evaluative assertions and hesitations over details. In many cases, the same formal dynamics that I argue are central to a poet's strategy have provoked early and recent readers of a poem. My refusal to lock poems into contextual coffins relates to another claim: that analyzing these poets' conceptions and instigations of reading, and the results of their efforts, can aid us in reconsidering recent practices of literary criticism and pedagogy.