ИСТИНА

Sharing the general interest in Victorian urban spaces the paper contributes to the discussion by taking poetry for its material. Dating back to Benjamin's canonical study of Baudelaire the French poetry has received much scholarly attention as a source of insights into the paradoxical relationship between urbanism and modern sensibility. Meanwhile, the same interest towards the British literature of the time has been almost exclusively focused on prose writing. My claim is that the late Victorian poetry has much to reveal about «the irrevocable transformation of the very fabric of modern existence» in the largest of the 19th century metropolises. The paper suggests a reading of several collections of poetry where the London experience is thematized and reflected upon in various genres and modes of diction: «A London Plane-Tree» by Amy Levy (1889), «London Voluntaries» by W.H. Henley (1893), «London Nights» by Arthur Symons (1895), «London Visions» by Lawrence Binyon (1896, 1899). My reference point is the classical work by Simmel «The Metropolis and Mental Life» (1903) that comes from the same fin-de-siècle cultural context. What I take from Simmel is a) his fundamental concern for the destiny of the individual in the modern city; b) his link of individualism with “culture” which he conceives in terms of refined “subjectivity” and opposes to the “objective” impersonal forces of encroaching “civilization”; c) his dialectical vision of the modern city that both grants and frustrates unprecedented opportunities for freedom and self-perfection.