5 - ‘As Flat as Fleet Street’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot on Epic and Modernity

Summary

The impossibility of a primary epic in the nineteenth century was not a consideration that impressed Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who announced an aesthetic in Aurora Leigh (1856) diametrically opposed to that which dominates Sigurd the Volsung and was equally opposed to the aesthetic notions underlying The Idylls of the King. This chapter will discuss what is in effect the inverse of the problems discussed in the previous one. The search for a national epic, for Tennyson and Morris at least, necessarily meant writing poetry set in the past. I have suggested how ideas of modernity were intertwined, by negation, with a historicised notion of epic. This interdependence entailed particular problems for those poets and writers who wished to write in an elevated or unironic mode about the contemporary world. For Barrett Browning herself, for Matthew Arnold and for George Eliot, the possibility of a valid aesthetic addressed to their contemporaneity involved a negotiation with the model of epic poetry. Inevitably, this topic, as the inclusion of George Eliot sufficiently indicates, involves the transition from epic to novel, whose relationship is discussed more fully in the following chapter.

The phrase ‘as flat as Fleet Street’ in the title of this chapter comes from Book V of Aurora Leigh, in a passage in which the poet is considering the possibility of writing heroic poetry set in the contemporary world.