The Bees of Rome: Representing Social and Spiritual Transition in Victorian Poetry

A major reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell, this book is the first to examine the role played by scent and perfume in Victorian literary culture. Perfume-associated notions of imaginative influence and identity are central to this study, which explores the unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature, concentrating on texts associated with aestheticism and decadence, but also noting important anticipations in Romantic poetry and prose, and earlier Victorian poetry and fiction. Throughout, literary analysis is informed by extensive reference to the historical and cultural context of Victorian perfume. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things such as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.

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Romantic and Victorian Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop in Context ◽

10.1017/9781108856492.015 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 149-162

Author(s):

Peter Swaab

Keyword(s):

Victorian Poetry

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The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate

Victorian Periodicals Review ◽

10.1353/vpr.2013.0050 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 46 (4) ◽

pp. 572-573

Author(s):

Lindsy Lawrence

Keyword(s):

Victorian Poetry

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Victorian Poetry Index: Volume 58, 2020

Victorian Poetry ◽

10.1353/vp.2020.0034 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 58 (4) ◽

pp. 531-532

Keyword(s):

Index Volume ◽

Victorian Poetry

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LYRICAL STUDIES

Victorian Literature and Culture ◽

10.1017/s1060150399272178 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 521-530 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

Virginia Jackson ◽

Yopie Prins

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Women Poets ◽

Victorian Poetry ◽

Women's Poetry ◽

Victorian Women ◽

On Line ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

The 19Th Century ◽

Victorian Women Poets

THE VICTORIAN POETESS has become as important a figure in the late twentieth century as she was in the late nineteenth — perhaps because she seems now, as then, to have lapsed into the obscurity of literary history. In recent years feminist critics have been interested in reclaiming a tradition of nineteenth-century popular poetesses whose verse circulated broadly on both sides of the Atlantic. A spate of new anthologies, annotated editions, and critical collections (as well as texts now available on-line) has reintroduced supposedly lost women poets into the canon of Victorian poetry. Indeed, this recovery is often predicated on a rhetoric of loss, as if only by losing women poets we can rediscover and read them anew. Thus in recent advertisements for such anthologies, we read that Victorian Women Poets (edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds in 1995) “aims to recover the lost map of Victorian women’s poetry,” and British Women Poets of the 19th Century (edited by Margaret Higonnet in 1996) “restores the voices and reputations of these ‘lost’ artists”; likewise, the compendious Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock in 1996) “rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions.”

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