Irmtraud Huber’s new book on time in Victorian poetry is an ambitious contribution to an important and understudied topic. It aims to put to rest for once and for all the commonplace that poetry is timeless. Huber illustrates how this idea originated in the nineteenth century and persists even now in the notion that lyric poetry usually represents a singular moment and is not narrative. Instead, Huber finds in Victorian poetry a variety of alternative temporalities. Huber provides her own challenge to a longstanding critical error that Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins call, in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014), “lyricization,” which considers all poetry in terms of the lyric. But if Jackson and Prins argue that the lyricization of poetry happened to the poetry of the nineteenth century, from the backward glance of twentieth-century criticism, then Huber argues that lyricization happened in the nineteenth century as a part of a shift in ideas about timelessness.

Huber often helpfully divides big concepts into manageable categories, drawing distinctions between different kinds of time and timelessness. In the introduction, she argues that the concept of timelessness in relation to poetry changes in the nineteenth century from an “Aesthetics of the Enduring World” or of “Eternal Essence,” whereby poetry can represent what is permanent, to an “Aesthetics of Self-Sufficient Form,” in which form confers a sense of timelessness (7–8). This change comes about, Huber argues, in response to scientific developments that destabilized ideas of the eternal. Moreover, material developments in collective temporal Victorian lives, such as the standardization of time and the ubiquitous presence of clocks, in service of a developing economy that included the railway, fundamentally altered ideas about time.

Chapter 1 lays out the details of these scientific developments, considering first how they challenged the very existence of eternal truths and therefore poetry’s claims to embody them. Huber then considers how poets, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as essays and reviews on poetry, addressed the question of whether it was possible or advisable for poetry to represent the modern and whether there was anything at all poetic about modernity, a question that appears again in chapter 4 with regard to railway poetry.

In chapter 2, Huber considers three genres of Victorian poetry—the dramatic monologue, the verse novel, and the poetic sequence—as solutions to the problems of temporality these historical shifts present. The works in this chapter are examples, Huber asserts, of “different kinds of solutions for a central temporal puzzle: how to negotiate or redefine poetry’s claim to eternity in a cultural context in which change has become a central paradigm” (73). This chapter develops dramatic, narrative, and lyric poetry as temporal and poetic categories, more than broadly generic ones, exposing how they can mingle and overlap within individual works.

Chapter 3 argues that as modernity brings about a temporality of speed and acceleration, middle- and upper-class men write poems about idleness as a way of situating poetic production and consumption against an imperative toward economic success. Poems about the working class get a brief mention for articulating idleness as a longed-for rest. A second section focuses on poems by and about women, like Tennyson’s “Mariana” or Christina Rossetti’s “The Prince’s Progress,” in which idleness is a prison. If poetic engagement is idleness for men, it constitutes activity for women. A final section on Christina Rossetti’s devotional poetry suggests that the poet denies that time is a forward progression in its focus on a divine eternity. Ultimately, the men writing poetry aim to hold on to poetry as timeless contemplation in an “Aesthetics of Self-Sufficient Form,” but can only do so from their position of privilege.

Focusing on how the changing concepts about time in the nineteenth century influenced debates about prosody, chapter 4 begins with an overview of scholarship on nineteenth-century prosody while also identifying Georg Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835) as a key source for the distinction between rhythm and meter as well as for ideas about time. Huber provides a clear introduction to the New Prosody, originating largely with Coventry Patmore, who insisted that meter consists of “isochronous intervals,” felt as a mental abstraction. Noting that the term “isochrony” comes primarily from a discourse about pendulums, metronomes, and clocks, Huber asserts that Patmore’s metrical theories work to naturalize the mechanical by conceptualizing mental abstraction in mechanical terms. Huber notes that work on and in Victorian versification often distinguishes between the abstract, the mechanical, and the metrical on the one hand and the organic, the embodied, and the rhythmic on the other. She most successfully troubles these binaries in the section on poems about the railway, in which Alexander Anderson, himself a railway laborer, opposes the embodied time of human and train against the abstract and socially dictated time of the railway schedule.

In the final chapter, the goal is loftier yet, aiming for a new theory of poetic temporality that applies across historical periods and could extend to prose literature as well. Here, Huber returns to the generic temporalities from chapter 2: narrative, dramatic, and lyric. Drawing on Sharon Cameron’s idea, in Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (1979), of layered time in the lyric, Huber further parses types of lyric temporality into ones with zero temporal layering or primarily discursive poems, singulative ones trying to render a moment permanent, and iterative or durative poems representing repeated or continuous actions. Within the “semiotics of time,” Huber delineates four categories: “historical,” “chronographical,” “chronorelational,” and “semantic.” The goal of all of this categorization is to undo the narrative/lyric binary, not just because Victorian readers would not have recognized it, but so that scholars of our own era can talk about literary and poetic time with more sophistication and nuance.

No book on so large and important a topic can be fully comprehensive, but Huber makes a considerable effort in each chapter to consider her questions from multiple angles and with reference to various poets. Huber’s book will be both a crucial starting point and an inspiration for scholars who want to understand how poems shape time.