Reciting, Marching, Singing: The Collective Political Voice of Victorian Poetry

This article makes the case that Victorian poetry has something distinctive to offer, in this moment of neoliberal individualism, to the project of building collectives. We might at first assume that the novel form more readily affords an engagement with social worlds, focused as it is on the interaction of characters with each other and with socioeconomic conditions. But this essay reads the collective “we” speaker of Victorian poetry as an effective form for bringing people together. It considers Ebenezer Elliott’s “Caged Rats” (1831), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1843), Rudyard Kipling’s disturbing “Recessional” (1897), and William Morris’s “March of the Workers” (1885) as different models for speaking together in groups.