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Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Catherine Robson
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Abstract

This paper considers the significance of the memorized poem in Victorian schools across the English social spectrum. I use Felicia Hemans's culturally ubiquitous “Casabianca” as a lens to examine the processes by which compulsory recitation forged short-term and long-term bodily relations between individuals and measured language. I argue that the denigration of regular poetic form prominent in the twentieth century's rejection of works like Hemans's poem is an inevitable, if disavowed, response to their institutional histories in the lowest-status echelons of the educational system. The fragmented survival of “Casabianca” in English popular consciousness today is the last remaining trace of its pedagogical past, of a time when the iamb connected to the heartbeat in a manner that we no longer appreciate and cannot feel.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 1: Special Topic: On Poetry , January 2005 , pp. 148 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

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