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Notes on contributors
Barbara Barrow is Assistant Professor of English at Point Park University. Her areas of interest include literature and science and nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. She recently completed a book manuscript, Political Dialects: Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry, which examines the link between language-controversies and the rise of radical politics in Victorian Britain, and she is beginning a new project on Anglophone poetry and scientific culture in nineteenth-century India. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Periodicals Review.
Notes
1 For an extensive study of geological time in the nineteenth century see Rudwick (Citation2008).
2 See, for example, Willey (Citation1956).
3 See Beer ([1983] Citation2009) and Levine ([1988] Citation1991). For more recent examples of the “one culture” approach see Holmes (Citation2009), Holmes (Citation2014), and Purton (Citation2013).
4 For the use of classical references in science writing see Beer (Citation2010) and O’Connor (Citation2007).
5 For a different reading of this passage see Buckland (Citation2013, 123-24). Buckland stresses how Lyell here uses Dante to expose the cosmological worldview that underlay the seemingly secular work of Wernerian geologists. I am stressing how Lyell’s language of erasure undermines any appeals to epic as a source of authority.
6 As Aristotle writes, ancient epic poets were succeeded by tragedians, who shared their aim to imitate “in verse of characters of a higher type” (60). The two genres are different in that “Epic poetry admits but one kind of meter, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but to slightly exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time” (60).
7 See Millhauser (Citation1971), Fulweiler (Citation1984), and Dean (Citation1985).
8 I am emphasizing here how “matin songs” might be read as referring to ancient epic poetry, particularly when we consider the heroic language of “songs” and “deeds” that follow this quotation and Tennyson’s own annotation for the Eversley edition, provided by Erik Gray in the Norton edition of the poem, in which Tennyson claims that this phrase denotes the “great early poets” (In Memoriam, n.3, p.52). However, Tennyson is surely also referring to the hymns of Christian services here as well. For Tennyson’s relationship to forms of religious practice see Blair (Citation2012, 163-196).
9 Gray identifies these muses in In Memoriam, n.1, p. 30.
10 Gray provides Tennyson’s annotation in In Memoriam, n.1, p. 77
11 Rudy (Citation2006), in “Rapturous Forms,” reads Blind’s poetry in the context of the Spasmodic movement. Tucker notes that Spasmody tended to take on epic and dramatic forms (Citation2008, 340).
12 I am working from the 1889 edition of the poem published by Chatto & Windus, and it has no line numbers. I am giving page numbers here instead.