ABSTRACT
In Victorian Poetry Isobel Armstrong develops some of the ideas she projected in her essay on Christina Rossetti. In particular, she reads Victorian poetry in terms of its contemporary aesthetic theories; and she pays close and detailed attention to language, rejecting any theory that ignores the specificity of individual poems. In doing so, they set up themes and techniques useful to the later Victorian women poets, such as the exploration of different cultures, or the dramatic monologue. Poetry by working-class women could be as didactic as that of middle-class women, if not more so. The poem is supposedly the utterance of a persona: it is a mask, a role-playing, a dramatic monologue; it is not to be identified with herself or her own feminine subjectivity. Laetitia Landon wrote many poems which pictured pictures, freezing women in a static but intense moment just before or just after an event has occurred.
