Victorian wanderers: Redefining the poet's place. The poetry of Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and James Thomson (B. V.)

Most critical studies of wandering in English poetry have focused on the Romantic poets, yet the trope of wandering appears frequently throughout Victorian poetry as well, in ways substantially different from how it is used by the Romantics. The trope of wandering is for Victorian poets an important, active expression of their concerns about the poet's role. The wanderer poems show these poets tentatively exploring new kinds of poetry and trying to figure out who the poet is, and where (if anywhere) he belongs. In using the wanderer as a poet figure, the Victorian poets risked incurring the traditionally negative associations of the word wanderer. Historically, the wanderer has been perceived as a potential threat to society. In my introduction, I trace the wanderer both as an historical and a literary phenomenon, concentrating especially on the Romantic poets' reversal of the usual associations of wandering. The Romantic heritage strongly influenced Victorian poets, but I discuss the important differences between Romantic and Victorian wanderers. In Victorian literature in general the wanderer is usually an expression of exile, but the Victorian poets push this idea further, using wandering as a self-conscious expression of their uncertainty about poetry's place and function.I focus on three poets for whom wandering and its variations are central metaphors: Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and James Thomson. In Chapter I, I discuss the poetic possibilities represented in Arnold's early wanderer poems and the ways in which Arnold's wanderers tend to "undo" his stated ideals for poetry. In Chapter II, I discuss Clough's use of the wanderer as a model for the poet and the change in his poems as he considers the difficulties of engagement through wandering. In Chapter III, I conclude with James Thomson, for whom the wandering condition represents the essential separation of the poet from others. For all three poets, the trope of wandering was a way of redefining the poet's place in nineteenth-century British society and literature.