Neo-Victorian Nagra: Rethinking the Victorian Empire in Twenty-First-Century Poetry

Daljit Nagra’s three Faber poetry collections all appropriate Victorian literature and culture at the same time as they grapple with the difficult heritage of British colonialism and other crucial questions that have long concerned scholars of postcolonialism. A relatively early and oft-cited example of his engagement with a Victorian literary text is the title-poem from his first Faber volume ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ (2007), which rethinks Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), but this is certainly not the sole instance of Nagra’s Neo-Victorianism. And yet, criticism on this aspect of his poetry has usually been confined precisely to the discussion of the relationship between his award-winning ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ and Arnold’s poem. Even so, neither this nor any other of Nagra’s various reworkings of Victorian literature and culture appear to have been interpreted in the light of the well-established critical category of ‘Neo-Victorian’, which, in fact, continues to be only rarely applied to poetry. In an attempt to highlight a meaningful but largely neglected thread of Neo-Victorian experimentation in Nagra’s poetry, my paper will particularly focus on his creative engagement with the writing of Rudyard Kipling in ‘Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!’ (2012). Building upon John McLeod’s recent analysis of ‘Meditations on the British Museum’ (2017) as a text in which Nagra revisits ‘the past to confront and contest the colonial present by striking up new relations’, I aim to assess the political significance of Nagra’s Neo-Victorian writing within his larger poetic output, which often takes the form of a reflection on and a response to the difficult history and heritage of the British Empire from the standpoint of the twenty-first century