38 - Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster

Summary

Looking back from between the two world wars, it might have been easy to forget that any of the poets considered in this chapter had existed. John Drinkwater omitted them all from his introductory study Victorian Poetry (1923). F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) regarded no late Victorian except Gerard Manley Hopkins. Revaluation (1936) did not go any further. ‘A study of the latter end of The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse’, Leavis said, suggests ‘the conclusion that something has been wrong for forty or fifty years at the least.’ Browning and Tennyson dominated Drinkwater’s conception of the period and he admitted he was sorry only to have missed Thomas Hardy. But Hardy was ‘post-Victorian in character’ anyway. That idea would become a category which would do criticism some service: turned the other way around, it gave to later twentieth-century writers a useful reason for rereading some late Victorian poets that the earlier period had set aside or explicitly disliked. It is true that Isobel Armstrong’s influential study Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993) was nearly as silent on the poets in this chapter as her predecessors entre deux guerres. But, for others, John Davidson (1857–1909) and Michael Field (Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913)) were particular beneficiaries of the ‘post-Victorian’ argument. Or rather, not as ‘post-Victorian’ but as ‘pre-Modernist’, they could be integrated into a larger cluster of late nineteenth-century writers – George Gissing, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, Francis Thompson, even John Ruskin among them – and read as precursors of Modernist themes and literary practices.