Networks of Political Poetry in a Trans-Channel Literary Triangle
in their 2001 collection of essays, The Literary Channel , Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever locate the origins of the novel in a trans-Channel literary zone, a space where French and British transcultural networks reflected on the imagined borders of the nation-state. Poetry too was embedded in such political and formal networks. During the mid-Victorian decades, a variety of poets harnessed nationally inflected lyric forms such as the French chanson and ballade, the quasi-Shakespearean dramatic monologue, and the italian improvvisazione and sonnet to triangulate French and British exchanges with the marginalized perspective of r isorgimento i taly. thus elizabeth Barrett Browning, informed by Germaine de Stael’s Corinne (1807), voices the spirit of Young italy in her Casa Guidi Windows (1851), while Arthur Hugh Clough puts Pierre-Jean Beranger’s lewd chansons in the mouth of the Spirit as he lures the pure-minded Dipsy chus to moral capitulation in the streets of post-revolutionary Venice (Dipsychus and the Spirit [1865]). An especially lively exchange took place in the early 1870s when Louis n apoleon, once the self-styled “saviour” of a politically gridlocked France (“Foreign intelligence”), was in his third and final exile in Britain