An Overview of the Victorian Period
The Victorian period
should be considered to have lasted from the 1830s to the advent of World War
I, almost the same time frame as the 17th-century civil wars. There are too
many capable poets whose works fit within these parameters to allow for even
the most basic form of justice to be applied to them. Hardy, who lived until
1928, is at the other end of the age from Tennyson. In its appreciation of
nature, idealism, subjectivity, and variety, Victorian poetry carries on the
romantic tradition. However, romanticism arrived first and occupied a large
area before the Victorians could do anything but divide and develop it. The
Romantics were able "to bring the whole soul of man into activity",
as Coleridge put it, in a way that the Victorians could not; the romantic
synthesis of heart and head broke down among them. The Victorians' romantic
view of nature was destroyed by new scientific discoveries, but poets like
Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, and Housman still had a romantic sensibility
without holding that view. The relationship between the poet and his audience
differed as well. The great mid-Victorians, despite their personal quirks, were
more central to their society and closer to a broad audience than the Romantics
were, and like the Victorian novelists, they were subject to unique obligations
and constrained by unique rules because of their closeness to their audience. The
last third of the 19th century reacted to earlier pieties in the neo-paganism
of Swinburne, of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and later
on of A E Housman; in the pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and Morris; and in the
art-for-art's-sake impressionism of the poets of the 1890s, indicated by the
shift in taste from Ruskin's art theories to Whistler's. Despite the presence
of much excellent poetry, the outcome is a derivative and decorative
romanticism that is responsible for the anti-romanticism of the 20th century.
The Victorians were
multi-genre and metrical experimenters, much like the Romantics. There is less
emphasis on the lengthy narrative or metrical romance than there once was, but
it is still present. The dramatic lyrics and monologues of Browning both speak
to his time and the future in a big way. Browning is also a part of Hardy's
dramatically ironic lyrics. Tennyson successfully adapted the dramatic
monologue in Ulysses, and he did it more elaborately in the
psychological "monodrama" Maud (1855). The Victorians were
influenced by lyrical theatre in the vein of Shelley's Hellas and Prometheus
Unbound through works like Arnold's Empedocles upon Etna (1852) and
Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (1865), the latter of which paved the
way for Sir Gilbert Murray's later translations of Greek tragedy. It follows a
same basic pattern as Hardy's magnificent panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, The
Dynasts (1903–8).
William Morris and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti both rework and tone down the romantics' literary
ballad. The main direct contribution of the Romantics to Victorianism was
Keats' influence, transferred through Tennyson. Tennyson's Idylls of the
King, an elevated tale that is too intensely visual and static to qualify
as epic, shows his modulations of Miltonic blank verse. Wordsworth's Michael's
pastoral style has somewhat decreased, although it is continued in Tennyson's Enoch
Arden (1864), in Arnold's more classical The Scholar Gipsy (1853),
and in George Meredith's seductive Love in the Valley (1851, 1878). After
Wordsworth, the sonnet tradition fell out of favour, but sonnet sequences like
Rossetti's House of Life (1848–1881) and Meredith's Modern Love
(1862) brought it back. With a reverence for the classics, Matthew Arnold
experimented with the epic in the marmoreal Sohrab and Rustum (1853) and
the pastoral elegy in Thyrsis (1863). In Memoriam (1850),
Tennyson's freer appropriation of the pastoral tradition, generated a more
vibrant and representative poem.
There were not many renowned satirists among the Victorians who preferred humour to wit. They tended to channel their confrontational tendencies into outright pastoral vituperation. However, Browning's works Mr. Sludge the Medium and Caliban upon Setebos show a genuine talent for satire that is un-Augustan in its complexity and love of the peculiar and grotesque. Of course, parody and nonsensical verse were not previously unknown when they first appeared in Edwin Lear, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Calverley, and W. S. Gilbert as separate genres. In Tennyson's Princess (1847) and Anther Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), the didactic-reflective poem evolved into a vers-de-société, and in Swinburne, it became a rhapsodic oration.
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