Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry or Victorian Compromise

Victorian Poetry/Victorian Compromise

The Victorian age was an age of material prosperity. The British Empire spread far and wide during the reign of Queen Victoria. The sun  never set in British Empire. Naturally the Victorians became highly complacent. The Victorian age refers to contradictory qualities of the mind and the spirit. It was outwardly materialistic but inwardly it was guided by,a deep spiritual vitality. 

                    The accident of death makes a break in poetry about 1830. Keats died in 1821, Shelley in 1822, Byron in 1824, and Coleridge and Wordsworth were poetically dead by 1830. A new poetry came with Tennyson and Browning, though critics of time were slow to recognize it. It is true that the Victorian age in English poetry is essentially a prolongation and an extension of the Romantic period.

                       Tennyson and Browning, the major Victorian poets, both succeeded in retaining real audience for poetry in an age when the novel had become the popular form of literature. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) is the

representative poet of the Victorian age. He voices thought, feeling, and aspiration more faithfully than any of his contemporaries. His poetry reflects the spirit of Victorianism as faithfully as the poetry of Alexander

Pope reflects the spirit of the Augustan Age. Tennyson's early poetry shows the influence of Keats. But he added to Keats's sensuousness something of literaliness of observation and moral pre-occupations. In

Tennyson's poetry the treatment is romantic, but themes reflect contemporary problems and concerns. Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and the poems of 1842 show Tennyson as a Victorian Romantic. The

premature death of his friend, Arther Henry Hallam, however, changed

the tone and spirit of his poetry. In The Princess (1847), Tennyson deals, picturesquely with the problem of the freedom of woman. This narrative

poem consists of fine songs and lyrics. Tennyson became the poet - laureate. He became the official voice of Victorian England. His Idylls of the King glorify the mythical King Arthur. The Idylls are full of

national sentiments. But In Memoriam (1850) is Tennyson's masterpiece. This long elegy containing about 150 lyrics records the poet's sorrow at the death of Hallam, and also his thought on the problem of life and death, his religious anxieties and his awareness of scientific Darwinian ideas. This authentic elegy became the greatest poem of the Victorian era. In  Memoriam followed by Maud (1855), a monodrama, is a rapid and feveish record, in a series of lyrics, of a love affair blasted by a tragic accident.

          There has been a reaction against Tennyson in the twentieth century Auden has described Tennyson as the stupidest of poets. Tennyson has been accused of Victorian sentimentality, of being the mouthpiece of Victorian Compromise. But he has been praised as the poet of the perfect phrase and as a fine lyric poet.

Robert Browning (1812-89), like Tennyson, lived and died a poet and nothing else. Except for his romantic love for Elizabeth Barret and his adventurous marriage with her, Browning's life was devoted wholly to the writing of poetry. His first poem Pauline was written under the inspiration

of Shelley, whom Browning called 'the sun-treader' . It is a self-confessional monologue. But the dramatic element has not yet appeared. In his later poems, Browning appeared as the master of the dramatic monologue. He was interested not so much in the conflict of a group of characters, as in the fortune of a single mind, and for this purpose he evolved the 'dramatic monologue'. It was in the form of the dramatic monologue that many of his best known poems were composed. They are included in a series of volumes, including Dramatic Lyric (1842), Men and Women (1855) and Dramatic Personae (1864). In Pippa Passes, his ideas are simply but aptly shown through a series of human actions. In The Ring and the Book (1868-69), a series of dramatic monologues is woven to make one of the longest poems in the English language. Browning's poetry is highly obscure, but he is praised by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as the most modern of the Victorian poets. Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-61), Robert Browning's talented wife, made her mark in her Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, a verse tale. 

    

               Matthew Arnold (1822-88), son of the famous Rugby School

Headmaster, was educated at Oxford. He found himself overshadowed in his life-time by the genius of Tennyson and Browning, but as a poet and critic, he has a claim almost to equal recognition. He was deeply read in classical and modern European literatures, French and German. He was profoundly influenced by Wordsworth and Goethe. By training, Arnold was a classicist, but he was a Romantic at heart. He tried to advocate the

principle of imaginative reason. He tried to strike a balance between classicism and Romanticism. He wrote certain poems-Merope and Sohrab and Rustum-to illustrate his faith in classicism. These neo-classical poems are rhther dull. But when Arnold listened to the Romantic longing in his heart, he was able to create memorable poetry in such poems as-The Scholar Gipsy, Dover Beach, Requiescat, The Forsaken Merman and Thyrsis, a pastoral elegy. Arnold's poetry presents a criticism of life. His best poetry is pervaded by a note of sadness. Like Tennyson and Hardy, Arnold gives expression to the Victorian dilemma. 

"Wandering between two worlds,
One dead, the other powerless to be born.
Arnold's sense of melancholy is best expressed in the following
memorable lines from Dover-Beach:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold further describes the Victorian age as an "iron time of doubts and distractions." Among the later Victorian poets we may consider Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. Hardy (1840-1928) has been
described as the last of the Victorians and the first of the moderns, He is a transitional poet recording the sense of Victorian pessimism and alienation. He is not a philosophical poet like his contemporary poet and novelist, Meredith. He is well-known for his love-lyric written in the form
of the dramatic monologue. As a poet, Hardy seems to continue the tradition of Browning and looks forward to Eliot and Pound. Neutral Tones and After a Journey are remarkable poems of love. When his work as a novelist was over, Hardy composed his epic drama of the Napoleonic
Wars- The Dynasts. George Meredith (1828-1909) began by composing delightful and easily intelligible lyrics of which the most memorable is Love in a Valley. His optimistic philosophy is recorded in his later poetry. Thus in Victorian poetry, there is an attempt to present the spirit of the
complex age. It is a poignant record of the Victorian dilemma.