An ebbigrammar of motives; or, ba for short.(Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

 
         worked and worn by passionate debates, 
   And losing by the loss it apprehends, 
   The flesh rocks round and every breath it sends 
   Is ravelled to a sigh. All tortured states 
   Suppose a straitened place. 
 
--EBB, "Finite and Infinite" (1850), ll. 5-9 (1) 

Just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the start of her third century has quite come of age, so have Barrett Browning studies come firmly into their majority, after a latency period and some feisty adolescence. If our honored poet was a rather lost saint a hundred years ago, by now we have found her again. (2) This is all to the good. Still, she seems a poet who remains at chronic risk of coterie re-sanctification if we fail--through a sin of omission not merely hypothetical--to hold her work to a less than high criterion of art. Strict poetic standards are the best critical offerings we can bring to an anniversary occasion like this special issue. The EBB whom I mean to praise is the EBB who meant to be above all, not a reformer or woman writer or evangelist or polemicist or lover but a poet, a maker of verbal art--in which capacity, to be sure, those other roles may be included and their several aims made good, nay better, in poetry's gift.

It is in the critic's contrarian mood, then, of loyal opposition that I have thought to try EBB's work against a standard of aphoristic concision, a standard that seems the very reverse of what we tell ourselves we prize her for. The poet we know and warm to is after all a magnanimous figure of sweeping views, impulsive and heartfelt commitment to the persons she loved and the causes she embraced. She stands among us, on the whole, as a broad-minded liberal devoted to enlargement of the human prospect, implacable in resistance to those multiple oppressions whose recurrent nineteenth-century crime was to cramp by denial the authentic energies of all the human race. For these virtues of character we not only esteem but love her; and what makes it easy to do so is her lovable verses, which is to say, the very same accomplishment that led a certain stranger to blurt out to Miss Barrett, in the course of a certain indiscreet letter, that having read those verses he loved her too. (3) Mr. Robert Browning divined his correspondent's personality on the basis of her writerly manner. And in this question he, true poet that he was, divined truly. EBB wrote in accordance with the personality profile and sociocultural agenda I was just outlining: generously, sweepingly, impulsively, feelingly.

She wrote, above all else, fluently. She whelms us in a torrent of words, borne along a verse onrush that Ellen Moers compared to the "cascading water" in which the poet's imagination delighted. (4) The reader's experience of her poetry is shaped, as Alethea Hayter happily phrased it, by "forms welded together in flowing or glutinous structures," where that stick-to-your-ribs "glutinous" gets it just right. (5) Furthermore, this most fluent of the major Victorian poets can, let us admit it, seem downright superfluous in the literal sense of that adjective. That she is anything but superfluous to our literary history will go in these pages without saying; it is only a matter of time before even our more mulish counterparts in American studies realize how much of her weight they have been pulling for years without knowing it. Still, EBB does have a way of overflowing: I trust that other admirers too--on turning the page, say, of an apparently concluded stanzaic lyric, only to see how many more stanzas lie ahead--have been, I don't say discouraged by her volubility, but suitably impressed.

Taking as granted EBB's overriding aesthetic of fluency, the critic in quest of fineness and point who would lead an expedition in ebbigrammatology finds himself in initial difficulties. But the difficulties are only initial. For the agglutinated character of our poet's output actually gives us a license to look everywhere. There is no knowing in advance, when dealing with a poet affiliated to Victorian spasmodism--the mid-century movement whose hallmark, as Tennyson said to FitzGerald of Philip James Bailey's 1845 Festus, was the local proliferation of "very grand things"--when some grand little thing may turn up. (6) Figuratively speaking, EBB's inscriptive medium of choice was not, as it was with the Walter Savage Landor on whom she substantially ghost-wrote a discerning chapter for R. H. Horne's 1844 New Spirit of the Age, the gravitas of marble; it was "the burning lava of a song ... full-veined"; not sedimentary rock but metamorphic, schistous, conglomerate. (7)

And within the conglomeration who can say where we will not find embedded epigrammatic crystals of the first water, crisp-faceted jewelry in the rough? In prising them loose for assessment I make bold to follow the lead of EBB's's pioneering, waywardly brilliant disciple Emily Dickinson. In that fine book Literary Women, Ellen Moers has shown how Dickinson read Aurora Leigh in particular with a wild scavenger's rapacity, cruising unprincipled with Ralph Waldo Emerson for nothing but the lusters, and then reworking them by her own entirely different, angular and gnomic art of aphorism, as if to tap serving spoons into so many finger rings or twist brooches out of devices on tureens (Moers, pp. 56-62). Dickinson's creative remaking shows better than anything that the lusters of epigram were there to begin with in EBB and only wanted teasing out.

The "full-veined" ore may lie anywhere, then, in the volcanic flow of our poet's oeuvre; and before the prospecting begins let me draw, from the prevalence of that flow, a conclusion that will form the hub of my guiding argument. Where we do find embedded epigram in EBB's fluency, we should be prepared to find it at odds with itself. Generically the epigram, as against mere witticism, displays an internal tension of form, or content, or both; and to this tension its impact is due. EBB herself nicely derived Landor's tendency to obscurity from his "extreme concentration, and involution in brevity--for a short string can be tied in a knot, as well as a long one." (8) The comment also holds true of her who made it, about whom G. K. Chesterton says, and he should know: "She had one of the peculiar talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful concentration." (9) That power, like the strength of a knot, comes from a phrase's bent against itself. In like manner, I am proposing, within EBB's poetry of overflow the dialectic that energizes epigrams has to do with a constitutive ambivalence about just that pointed fixation of meaning which it is the generic boast of the epigram to perform. If multum in parvo is the aphorist's motto--much matter in little space--it is a motto that drew out our tiny-handed poet's conflicted attitude toward littleness as such. If closural neatness and the snap of internal correspondency were desiderata for well-written verse--and of course they were, and are, since considerable overlap obtains between epigrammatic virtues and the virtues of poetry itself--at the same time, for this impassioned champion of life in its manifold relations, tidiness of point lay under perpetual suspicion. As a result the sparkling nonce ebbigram, wherever we find it, will show signs of erosion by the blast of its own grander inspiration; it will be undermined by the subterranean currency in which the poet's art streams. So as we strap on the headlamp and activate the geiger counter, we should look for an ebbigrammar that, with motives compounded half of prodigality and half of self-doubt, keeps giving itself away.