With the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18), Lord Byron had successfully reestablished the international travel epic as a major genre, one that would continue to attract poets throughout the century. But as recent critical studies such as Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism and James Buzard's The Beaten Track have shown, interest in the lands of empire and the rise of continental tourism also gave new currency, influence, and prestige to other kinds of travel writing. The success of these genres pressured poets to defend their claim to a higher travel discourse at the same time Byron, with the help of the tourism industry, was becoming an increasingly tarnished form of literary capital.
In this paper, I explore how two mid-century poets and travellers, Arthur Hugh Clough and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, critique non-fiction travel genres such as guidebooks and prose narratives in an attempt to demarcate poetry as uniquely endowed to authenticate the experience of travel. At the same time, the Victorian travel epic is fashioned as an updated alternative to Byron and other Romantic travel poets. Modern Italy--Italy of the Risorgimento--forms the backdrop for both poets' works. For Barrett Browning, Italy becomes the source of social, political, and poetic new beginnings. For Clough, the disjointed and perplexing atmosphere of revolutionary Rome would shed new light on travel as a cultural and ideological phenomenon.
The fictional poets/travellers Clough creates in Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus travel at a time when the places Byron discovered and monumentalized as sites of solitary, individual transcendence have been transformed into places where "Murray's faithful Guide / Informs us Byron used to ride." In response, Clough champions travel poetry that avoids the quest for a sublime genius loci and instead focuses on just how illusory such "original" travel really is--how the traveller's gaze is always refracted by the economic and cultural apparatus of tourism. In Amours de Voyage, the state of siege enveloping Rome foregrounds forces only dimly apparent or wilfully ignored by the traveller under normal "guidebook" circumstances.
Like Clough, Barrett Browning shows little patience for "rhymers sonneteering in their sleep / And archaists mumbling dry bones up the land"--her description of travellers pre-occupied with Italy's past in Casa Guidi Windows. Barrett Browning develops a contrast between earnest, original travel and idle, culturally chauvinistic tourism as the defining difference not just between modes of travel but modes of discourse. The poet becomes a free-ranging diplomat, with an innate sense of the "soul" of Italy--what might be called the genius patriae. Aurora Leigh argues for the poet as higher traveller and the poetic travel narrative as the genre best equipped to offer insight into questions of fundamental political and philosophical importance.
Concluding with brief comments on The Ring and the Book and Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, I shall discuss the overall significance of the international travel epic, a sub-genre mostly overlooked in discussions of Victorian travel literature and poetics. The long poem, if unable to challenge the commercial dominance of non-fiction travel writing, would lay claim to a wider intellectual space in the literary realm, the source of a boundary-crossing and decentered self-awareness for more selective travellers and readers.
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