| Spasmodic poetry, a loosely-defined type of long, intense verse that flowered briefly in the early 1850s, implies an embodied poetics of disruption, pathology and intensity. With their trademark linguistic bombast, piles of metaphors, and passionate subjectivity, Spasmodic poems variously intoxicated and offended Victorian audiences. The vehemence of the reaction to Spasmodicism makes sense when Spasmodic poetry is read against two crucial nineteenth-century contexts: biology and poetry. On the one hand, Victorian debates over poetry centered on the changing role of the poet from a Romantic prophet to a more socially-oriented Victorian man of letters. Critics debated the usefulness of personal, emotive verse for the new urbanized, technologized, imperial Britain. Definitions of masculinity also shifted towards a more restrained, athletic model, capable above all of great self-control. At the same time, medical science laid new emphasis on the body as a de-hierarchized system of nervous centers. Mind, soul and being were understood as material; the body became the self. Spasms, which appear in medical literature as a nervous pathology, undercut the body's ability to maintain and control itself. Equally threatening to rhetorics of masculinity and literature, Spasmodicism suggested an embodied poetics of failed will, introspection, and effeminacy. These poets were thus laughed out of countenance by hostile critics who coined the parodic term "Spasmodic," a nickname that has stuck. This project considers the original reception of Spasmodic poetry in an attempt to recover the ways in which the Spasmodics were central to heated Victorian issues of contemporary poetry, gender, and physicality. Further, this project posits that spasms, as embodied bursts of both hyper-awareness and animalistic materiality, figure as nineteenth-century responses to modernity and emergent concerns about the limits of discipline, consciousness and language. |
