“Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John / Evanished all and gone!” Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Epi-Strauss-ism” laments, both utterly seriously and, as Charles LaPorte observes, with “wry bemusement” (116). Clough’s declaration about the impact of the higher criticism on Victorian religious thought, as biblical authority seemingly crumbled, stands with poems such as Robert Browning’s “A Death in the Desert” as direct and self-conscious reflections on this impact, their references evident to the twenty-first-century reader. Such works have been a staple of critical studies of Victorian poetry and the Bible, and LaPorte’s excellent study does not shy away from them. But its great strength is that it decenters them by demonstrating not simply that many Victorian poets wrote poems that engaged immediately with the higher criticism but that the enterprise of Victorian poetry, tout court, was profoundly shaped by changing perceptions of the Bible in the nineteenth century. The fact that Victorian poetry and religion were mutually influential discourses, and that Victorian poets, critics, and readers were inclined to interpret each in the light of the other, has been discussed by a number of recent critics, including William McKelvy and F. E. Gray. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible is a major intervention in this discussion because it convincingly shows that biblical criticism opened up the possibility that the sacred texts could be viewed as poetry and, hence, that poetry, including contemporary poetry, could aspire to the condition of a sacred text. This allows LaPorte to make a case for why poetry was important to the Victorians, why, even while writing Middlemarch (1871–72), a writer like George Eliot still wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion of poetry as the highest form of literature. LaPorte’s title is characteristically modest, for this is not simply a study of Victorian poetic responses to the Bible, as it might suggest, but a study of why Victorian poetry mattered and matters, then and now.

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible is less interested in tracing direct links between particular works of criticism and particular poems or poets, in examining who might have read what and when, than in investigating how the hermeneutics of biblical criticism pervade poems that might, at first glance, seem to have little direct connection to this field. One of the high points of the monograph, for instance, is LaPorte’s reading of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, in which he shows how Tennyson’s re-creation of a national mythic past that must be taken on faith deliberately parallels arguments about the need to create unity from increasingly disputed and fragmented biblical texts. Tennyson’s poem “confesses in advance” that it is purely mythological yet “still asks readers to embrace” this myth “as a key part of the national history” (69). As with other poems discussed here, the Idylls train Victorian readers in acts of faith, a training that might equally apply to their experience of Christianity. Such readings mean that it does not necessarily matter to what extent Tennyson was engaged with specific works of higher criticism; rather, what matters is that he “evidenced higher critical modes of thinking” (109). Similarly, with regard to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, LaPorte can argue that her poetry “attests to the force of the higher criticism although she leaves little independent evidence of having read it” (234) because she sees poetry in terms of inspiration and prophecy, valued for its spiritual truths irrespective of any problems of interpretation.

For such arguments to work, they need to be backed up by strong readings of the poems themselves, and fortunately LaPorte is an excellent close reader, skillful in tracing how the minute implications of language and form broaden outward into commentaries on major Victorian debates. While much of this study does concentrate on relatively well-known poems, like Clough’s Dipsychus and the Spirit (1865) or Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1869–70), it is particularly good to see relatively neglected works, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Seraphim (1838) or Browning’s Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), and indeed all of Eliot’s poetry, coming under LaPorte’s fine scrutiny. Each chapter takes varied approaches to selected poems, as in-depth explorations of a precise aspect of one work—how Browning’s Pompilia relates to Anna Jameson’s discussions of Catholic hagiography, for example—are nicely related to the book’s central argument. With justice, LaPorte restricts himself to poets writing from Protestant, largely Evangelical backgrounds, covering the Brownings, Clough, Tennyson, and Eliot. It is refreshing to read a study of Victorian poetry and religion that barely mentions Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and the Anglo-Catholic/Roman Catholic tradition, central in many recent accounts, although it would be interesting to have more on the different attitudes that such Catholic poets brought to disputes over the Bible. Recent work by young scholars such as Martin Dubois suggests the possibilities in, for instance, Hopkins’s varying uses of different biblical translations, and LaPorte’s work should provide a good starting point for similar new research.

LaPorte writes with poise and humour and wears his extensive knowledge lightly. Many critics of Victorian religion (including myself) are hampered, just as many Victorian commentators were, by not reading German, so LaPorte’s ability to work with original German (and French) texts here is particularly important in situating these writers in their wider European context. This is a very learned study, but it is also lively and readable and would be valuable for undergraduate students as well as scholars. LaPorte manages to take a subject that can seem intimidating in its complexity and in the passion and knowledge that Victorian writers brought to abstruse debates about details of biblical history and interpretation and restore its force for Victorian poetry studies and, indeed, Victorian studies more generally.