Victorian Poetry
Romantic poetry → Victorian poetry → Modernism:
 influence of romantic poetry: mostly Keats
 the most important difference: a growing sense of distance, less confidence in the
power of poetic imagination [cf. Browning suggesting that after the subjective
prophets there must come another race of poets: “prodigal of objects for men’s outer
and not inner sight”]
 general feature: Victorian poetry is usually pictorial: creates visual images to represent
emotions, situations (→ Imagism of the early 20th century)
Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
- the celebrated poet of the age: a superb technician, in his early poetry showing the influence
of Keats – vivid descriptions, lavish ornamentation
- early volumes: 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 1832 Poems, 1842 Poems
- both “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Lotos-Eaters” were first published in the
1832 volume, then revised for the 1842 volume – both show Tennyson’s “passion
of the past”: the first relies on the medieval, the second on the classical tradition
- “The Lady of Shalott”: a similar story to that of Elaine, the ‘White Maid of
Astolat’ (Arthurian legends), though Tennyson’s source was an Italian ‘novella’ –
ways of interpretation: the isolation of the artist (the lady singing, weaving, the
world of poetic/creative imagination seems brighter than reality); the isolation of
the Victorian woman
- “The Lotos-Eaters”: based on an episode from Homer’s Odyssey: the sailors
returning home after the fall of Troy land on a strange island, they taste the fruits
of the lotos plant growing there, feeling a languorous content they bocome
reluctant to continue their journey home → the desire to withdraw from the world
of work and competitive struggle, → weariness, a desire for rest, for death [“We
have had enough of action, and of motion...”, “Surely, surely, slumber is more
sweet than toil ...”]
1850 In Memoriam – elegy, on the death of Arthur Hallam – meditates upon questions of faith
and doubt (different interpretations: the ‘Victorian’ view – like that of Queen Victoria - :
“Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort”; the modernist’s view: T.S. Eliot: the
poem is remarkable not “because of its faith but because of its doubt”)
1850 Poet Laureate: Tennyson’s awareness of his duties as the leading poet of his country –
accepting the role as a guide of the public, his poetry becoming more didactic
The Idylls of the King rewriting the legend of King Arthur to the Victorian readers dedicating it to the Queen, likening Prince Albert to the great King of the Round Table
Robert Browning (1812-89)
- early enthusiasm: for Byron and Shelley
- Sordello (1840): the story of a 13th-century troubadour [traveller poet and singer] → made
him notorious of his ‘obscurity’
- most known of his dramatic monologues (a poem consisting of the speech by a single
character – historical or imaginary - who reveals his thoughts, character and situation; in
Browning’s poems: mostly ironic character-sketches)
- “My Last Duchess” (published in Dramatic Lyrics 1842): one of his early dramatic
monologues set in the 16th-century Ferrara, the reader listens to the duke as he
speaks of his dead wife (although it is part of an imaginary conversartion, the
reader gets only the words of the duke) and it is left to the reader to piece
together the situation, the character of the dutchess and the character of the duke;
the power of the poem lies in the tension between the story and judgement the
duke thinks he is giving and the one that is finally gained by the reader (that he
arranged the murder of his wife) → Browning’s interest in the psychology of the
speaker
- aims at psychological insight (cf. also: “Porphyria’s Lover” [note the speaker’s
abnormal state of mind], and “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Andrea del Sarto” [in Men and
Women 1855]): “My stress lay on incidents in the development of the human
soul, little else is worth study.”
- they provide distance - Browning resented any suggestion that he revealed his own
mind in his characters → objectivity (cf.: the comment of George Eliot: “we
would rather have ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ than any essay on Realim in Art”)
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1852): the quest of a knight (mentioned in
Shakespeare’s King Lear), ‘child(e)’: means a youth, usually a candidate for knighthood;
the Dark Tower: his mysterious, ultimate goal: after a journey through a frightening
wasteland Roland reaches the tower, blows his horn, but what happens after is left unsaid
– an enigmatic, nightmarish poem: Is it a ‘Victorian’ story of courage and gain or the
presentation of a ‘modern’ wasteland and hopelessness?
- in style: more colloquial and discordant than Victorian poets in general
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)
- in her time more popular than her husband (some suggested that she should follow
Wordworth at his death in 1850 as Poet Laureate)
- appreciated by the Victorians mostly for her poems of social awareness: “The Cry of the
Children” – written in response to the report on the inhuman conditions of children
employed in mines and factories (R.H. Horne, 1842) [“’How long, [the children] say,
‘how long, O cruel nation, / Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart?’”],
many of the details are taken from Horne’s writing; “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s
Point” – on the helpless situation of black slaves
- likewise comtemporary social concerns: Aurora Leigh (1856) - a verse novel on “the growth
of a female poet’s mind” (as such seen in parallel with Wordsworth’s Prelude) – the
heroine following her poetic vocation rather than becoming a typical Victorian wife
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850): a collection of sonnets (Petrarchan, but strongly
influenced by Shakespeare’s sonnets) published under the disguise of translations from the
Portuguese, very personal, commemorating her love relationship with Robert Browning
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1827-82)
- poet-painter, an early admirer of William Blake
- Italian background, the influence of Italian literature: Dante and the ‘dolce stil nuovo’
sonettiers [second half of the 13th century], also a number of translations from Italian to
English
- a life-long fascination with Dante and his love for Beatrice, with the spiritual connection
between earthly and unearthly, his search to seize the fleeting, emotionally tense moments
of life
- a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848): a group of artists intending to reform
British art – advocating the unity of the sister arts (cf.: his double-works), editing the
short-lived magazine: The Germ
- his early poem “The Blessed Damozel” first published there: the influence of Edgar Allen
Poe and Dante, gradual movement towards the unification of the blessed damozel and her
lover on earth, the denial of the traditional view of heaven, sensuality
The House of Life – his sonnet-sequence severely attacked by some of the contemporaries for
its (alleged?) sensuality
- his view of art and life – his concern rather for beauty than morals – anticipates the aesthetic
movement
Christina Rossetti (1830-94)
- a great variety in her poetry: much of it is devotional, but also nursery songs, dramatic
monologues, narrative fables, ballads, pure lyrics, children’s poetry
- her affinity with the Pre-Raphaelites can be seen in her minute, tangible descriptions, her
deceptively simple style
- most known work: “Goblin Market” – multilayered meaning: a simple tale of two sisters
tempted by goblin men to eat their forbidden fruits, or a religious account of sin and
redemption, or an erotic display of repressed sexuality
- her sonnet “In an Artist’s Studio” gives an account of her brother’s obsession with the
beauty of Elizabeth Siddal (herself writing poems and painting water-colours), often
interpreted on feminist terms: the model is ‘reduced’ to what she (her beauty) means to the
painter
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
- foreign influence is gaining ground in late Victorian poetry: Swinburne was an enthusiast of
Baudelaire: in his review on Fleurs du Mal: “a mass of readers seem actually think that a
poem is the better for containing a moral lesson”, but, according to Swinburne, it is not so
– a denial of the didactic aim of High-Victorian art and literature
- he intended to shock the public: attacking the traditional values like love, family, moral
codes
- in his essay on Blake: the declaration of ‘art for art’s sake’:
“Handmaid of religion, exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of morality [art] cannot
in any way become … [Art’s] business is not to do good on other grounds, but do good on
her own: all is well with her while she sticks fast to that.”
Gerald Manley Hopkins (1848-89)
- was a Jesuite (Roman Catholic) priest: most of his works: on his spiritual relations with God
- the influence of Metaphysical poetry, technical experimentation: invents new words,
combines words in surprising ways, sprung rhythm [based on the number of stresses
rather than on the number of syllables] → seen as a pioneering figure of modern literture
- a Victorian poet whose works became known only in 1918