Literature

Literature

Poetry
From 1826 to Ruskinʼs poetry appears in four forms:
  • as anthologies fair‐copied in the Red Books and other bound manuscripts; as single fair‐copy presentations of occasional poems, such as New Yearʼs Poems;
  • as inclusions within letters, whether as part of the text or as a separate enclosure; and, in a form of presentation that evidently was never fully realized in this earliest period of writing;
  • as a volume‐length poem—“Eudosia,” for example, apparently being intended;
  • as a “poem on the universe,” to fill MS IV.
In , Ruskin realized the ambition of a volume‐length poem with “Iteriad” in MS VII (albeit only briefly, as he follows “Iteriad” in that manuscript with an incomplete fair copy of the incompletely drafted Byronic epic, “Athens”). From , he compiles a volume‐length anthology, “Miscellaneous Poetry” in MS V.
Anthologies
Anthologies, 1826–27
The earliest extant anthologies are the MS I Poetry Anthology (1826–27); Poetry Descriptive (1827) in MS III; and, also in the latter Red Book, the MS III Second Poetry Anthology, and the MS III Third Poetry Anthology.
What was Ruskinʼs model for his first anthologies? In lesson dialogues by Maria Edgeworth and Jeremiah Joyce, he would have found poetry liberally quoted, especially poems by associates of the Lunar Society such as Erasmus Darwin. He may also have seen “miscellanies” and “beauties,” kinds of anthologies popular throughout the eighteenth century and into the 1820s.
Such anthologies, according to Barbara M. Benedict, encouraged their middle‐class audiences to construct literature “by responsive reading rather than by authorial control,” the author having “virtually disappeared from the presentation of his texts; the reader now ‘takes’ the text as he wills where once he took it as the authorʼs lesson” (Benedict, “Literary Miscellanies,” p. 409; see also Benedict, “‘Beauties’ of Literature,” p. 323). Ruskin does appropriate a poem by Erasmus Darwin and transform it as his own in “When furious up from mines the water pours” [“The Steam Engine”]. This evidence of reader‐centeredness is offset, however, by Edgeworthʼs training of her young readers in what one would now call close reading. In part 2 of Frank (1802), the boy, who is about Ruskinʼs age, is not told who authored lines he has heard recited by his father (the reader learns from a footnote that the author is Darwin), and Frank is cautioned by his mother that he is too young to “‘understand the sense of them yet’”; nonetheless, his mother leads Frank through a close analysis of the linesʼ metaphor and diction that can scarcely be considered unstudious of authorized meaning (Edgeworth, Works, 12: 195, and see pp. 195–99).
Another function dramatically evident in the MS I Poetry Anthology is the “forging” of identity that Linda Colley characterizes as the making of Britons in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The spring of that formation, fear of the Other (Francophobia) invading the homeland, is the most persuasive explanation for RRuskinʼs motives in his (possibly overdetermined) poem, “The Defiance of War”. The identity thus imaginatively preserved in this poem is, in the anthology, welded both to North Briton and to South, with the poems “On Scotland” and “When furious up from mines the water pours” [“The Steam Engine”] —the latter an imitation of a poem by the English Midlands poet, Erasmus Darwin, celebrating in turn the invention by the illustrious Scot, James Watt. The final poem of the anthology, “On the Rainbow: In Blank Verse”, seems to seal the collection with the “apocalyptic interpretation of history” that, as Colley remarks, represented Britain as Israel “and its opponents as Satanʼs accomplices,” a conviction that remained engraved in British minds, unfaded by rationalism, and that characterized the thinking of “many devout Protestants,” Dissenter and Anglican alike (Colley, Britons, pp. 30–31).