Topics so far –
Now –
18. The Victorian Age: Part –
I
Victorian Age – I [Poetry]
THE
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
1. An Era of Peace: The few
colonial wars that broke out during the Victorian epoch did not seriously
disturb the national life. There was one Continental war that directly affected
Britain--the Crimean War--and one that affected her indirectly though strongly –the
Franco-German struggle; yet neither of these caused any profound changes. In
America the great civil struggle left scars that were soon to be obliterated by
the wise statesmanship of her rulers.
The whole age may
be not unfairly described as one of peaceful activity. In the earlier stages
the lessening surges of the French Revolution were still felt; but by the
middle of the century they had almost completely died down, and other hopes and
ideals, largely pacific, were gradually taking their place.
2. Material Developments:
It was an age alive with new activities. There was a revolution in commercial
enterprise, due to the great increase of available markets, and, as a result of
this, an immense advance in the use of mechanical devices. (The new commercial
energy was reflected in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was greeted as the
inauguration of a new era of prosperity. On the other side of this picture of
commercial expansion we see the appalling social conditions of the new industrial
cities, the squalid slums, and the exploitation of cheap labour (often of children),
the painful fight by the enlightened few to introduce social legislation and
the slow extension of the franchise.) The evils of the Industrial Revolution
were vividly painted by such writers as Dickens and MrsGaskell, and they called
forth the missionary efforts of men like Kingsley.
3. Intellectual Developments:
There can be little doubt that in many cases material wealth produced a
hardness of temper and an impatience of projects and ideas that brought no
return in hard cash; yet it is to,the credit of this age that intellectual
activities were so numerous. (There was quite a revolution in scientific
thought following upon the works of Darwin and his school, and an immense
outburst of social and political theorizing which was represented in this
country by the writings of men like Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill) In
addition, popular education became a practical thing. This in its turn produced
a new hunger for intellectual food, and resulted in a great increase in the
productions of the Press and of other more durable species of literature.
The sixty years
(1830-90) commonly included under the name of the Victorian age present many
dissimilar features; yet in several respects we can safely generalize.
1. Its Morality: Nearly all
observers of the Victorian age are struck by its extreme deference to the
conventions. To a later age these seem ludicrous. It was thought indecorous for
a man to smoke in public and (much later in the century) for a lady to ride a
bicycle. (To a great extent the new morality was a natural revolt against the
grossness of the earlier Regency, and the influence of the Victorian Court was
all in its favour. In literature it is amply reflected.., Tennyson is the most conspicuous
example in poetry, creating the priggishly complacent Sir Galahad and King
Arthur, Dickens, perhaps the most representative of the Victorian novelists,
took for his model the old picaresque novel; but it is almost laughable to
observe his anxiety to be 'moral.' This type of writing is quite blameless, but
it produced the kind of public that denounced the innocuous Jane Eyre as wicked
because it dealt with the harmless affection of a girl for a married man.
2. The Revolt: (Many writers
protested against the deadening effects of the conventions. Carlyle and Matthew
Arnold, in their different accents, were loud in their denunciations; Thackeray
never tired of satirizing the snobbishness of the age; and Browning's cobbly
mannerisms were an indirect challenge to the velvety diction and the smooth
self-satisfaction of the Tennysonian school. As the age proceeded the reaction strengthened.
In poetry the Pre-Raphaelites, led by Swinburne and William Morris, proclaimed
no morality but that of the artist's regard for his art. By the vigour of his methods
Swinburne horrified the timorous, and made himself rather ridiculous in the eyes
of sensible people. It remained for Thomas Hardy (whom we reserve for the next chapter)
to pull aside the Victorian veils and shutters and with the large tolerance of
the master to regard men's actions with open gaze.
3. Intellectual Developments:
The literary product was inevitably affected by the new ideas in science,
religion, and politics. On the Origin of Species (1859) of Darwin shook to its
foundations scientific thought. We can perceive the influence of such a work in
Tennyson's In Memoriam, in Matthew Arnold's meditative poetry, and in the works
of Carlyle. In religious and ethical thought the 'Oxford Movement,' as it was
called, was the most noteworthy advance. This movement had its source among the
young and eager thinkers of the old university, and was headed by the great
Newman, who ultimately (1845) joined the Church of Rome. As a religious portent
it marked the widespread discontent with the existing beliefs of the Church of
England; as a literary influence it affected many writers of note, including
Newman himself, Froude, Maurice, Kingsley, and Gladstone.
4. The New Education: The
Education Acts, making a certain measure of education compulsory, rapidly
produced an enormous reading public. The cheapening of printing and paper
increased the demand for books, so that the production was multiplied. The most
popular form of literature was the novel, and the novelists responded with a
will. Much of their work was of a high standard, so much 'So that it has been
asserted by competent critics that the middle years of the nineteenth century
were the richest in the whole history of the novel.
5. International Influences:
During the nineteenth century the interaction among American and European
writers was remarkably fresh and strong. In Britain the influence of the great
German writers was continuous, and it was championed by Carlyle and Matthew
Arnold. Subject nations, in particular the Italians, were a sympathetic theme
for prose and verse. The Brownings, Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith were deeply
absorbed in the long struggle of the followers of Garibaldi and Cavour; and
when Italian freedom was gained the rejoicings were genuine.
6. The Achievement of the Age:
With all its immense production, the age produced no supreme writer. It
revealed no Shakespeare, no Shelley, nor (in the international sense) a Byron
or a Scott. The general literary level was, however, very high; and it was an age,
moreover, of spacious intellectual horizons, noble endeavour, and bright aspirations.
If the poetry of
the Victorian era had to be grouped under two central figures, one of these
would be Tennyson, and the other Browning.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Launched Writing
Career In 1827, when he was almost eighteen years old, Tennyson’s first volume
of poetry, Poems by Two Brothers was published. Later that year, Tennyson
enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won the chancellor’s gold
medal for his poem ‘‘Timbuctoo’’ in
1829. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, published in 1830, was well received
and marked the beginning of Tennyson’s literary career.
Another
collection, Poems, appeared in 1832 but was less favorably reviewed, many
critics praising Tennyson’s artistry but objecting to what they considered an
absence of intellectual substance. The latter volume was published at the
urging of Arthur Hallam, a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate who had become
Tennyson’s closest friend and was an ardent admirer of his poetry. But Hallam’s
untimely death in 1833, which prompted the series of elegies later comprising In
Memoriam, contributed greatly to Tennyson’s despair.
Contributing to
his financial stability, the first edition of his narrative poem The
Princess: A Medley, published in 1847, sold out within two months.
Tennyson resumed his courtship of Sellwood in 1849, and they were married the
following year. The timely success of In Memoriam, published in 1850,
ensured Tennyson’s appointment as poet laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth.
The success of In Memoriam and his appointment as poet laureate assured
Tennyson the opportunity to become the poetic voice of his generation, and in
his ceremonial position he composed such poems as ‘‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’’ and ‘‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’’,
each of which is a celebration of heroism and public duty. Idylls of the King (1859), considered by Tennyson’s contemporaries
to be his
masterpiece, and Enoch Arden (1864),
which sold more than forty thousand copies upon publication, increased both his
popularity and his wealth and earned him the designation ‘‘the people’s poet.’’
Poet Laureate: Although the
dramatic works written later in his career like Queen Mary (1875) and The
Foresters (1892) were largely unsuccessful, Tennyson completed several
additional collections of poems in the last decade of his life, all of which
were well received. They included: Ballads
and Other Poems (1880), Tiresias,
and Other Poems (1885), and Demeter,
and Other Poems (1889). In 1883 he accepted a peerage, the first poet to be
so honored strictly on the basis of literary achievement. Ill for the last two
years of his life, Tennyson died on October 6, 1892, at his home and was
interred in Westminster Abbey.
Tennyson had
nearly a lifelong interest in the legends of King Arthur, which ultimately
resulted in Idylls of the King
(1889). Yet many critics believe that his most characteristic lyrics are unique
and individual, marked by a Tennysonian ‘‘something’’ that had no precedent in
English verse.
Idylls of the King and the British Empire:
Tennyson’s epic poem Idylls of the King
followed the controversial Maud by examining the rise and fall of idealism in
society. ‘‘I tried in my Idylls,’’ Tennyson wrote, ‘‘to teach men the need of
an ideal.’’ F. E. L. Priestley has observed that Tennyson used the ‘‘Arthurian
cycle as a medium for discussion of problems which [were] both contemporary and
perennial,’’ and concludes that the Idylls ‘‘represent one of Tennyson’s most
earnest and important efforts to deal with the major problems of his time.’’
Tennyson was concerned with what he considered to be a growing tendency toward
hedonism in society and an attendant rejection of spiritual values. Idylls of the King expresses his ideal
of the British empire as an exemplar of moral and social order: the ‘‘Table
Round / A glorious company’’ would ‘‘serve as a model for the mighty world.’’
However, when individual acts of betrayal and corruption result from adultery
committed by Arthur’s wife and Lancelot, the ensuing disorder destroys the
Round Table, symbolizing the effects of moral decay that were Tennyson’s chief
concern about the society of his day.
Note:-
Tennyson was just
one of many authors to tackle the legends of King Arthur. Each work focuses on
different aspects of the mythology, demonstrating the mutability and enduring
popularity of the stories.
Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), a
novel by Sir Thomas Malory. Perhaps the best-known version of the Arthurian
saga, Malory drew upon a multitude of sources to construct the story of
Arthur’s life and reign, from the ‘‘sword in the stone’’ to Arthur’s death at
the hands of his son Mordred.
The Once and Future King
(1958), a novel by T. H. White. In a modernized take on the Arthurian legends,
the mythological figures are updated with real-life emotions, the events of a
far-off time given contemporary relevance.
Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
(1976), a novel by John Steinbeck. This updated, ‘‘living’’ translation of Malory
is by the noted American author, long an admirer of the Arthurian cycle.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889),
a novel by Mark Twain. A comedic take on King Arthur’s Camelot, this novel
features a time-traveling American who introduces modern concepts and
inventions to his new medieval world.
The Mists of Avalon (1983), a
novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Arthurian cycle is retold from the
perspective of the women, chiefly the Ladies of the Lake in this novel. The
Knights of the Round Table and Arthur become the supporting characters, much as
the women are in conventional tales.
Today, Tennyson
is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language. This critical
reputation began in his lifetime when many of his poems were universally acclaimed.
By the end of his lifetime, however, there were the beginnings of an
anti-Victorian movement, as new styles of poetry and criticism emerged.
Tennyson was so closely identified with his era that his critics began
dismissing him with disillusionment for his Romantic stylistic and language
choices, which were considered Victorian. Many early twentieth-century readers
found his stylistic and subjective choices to be dated. By mid-century,
Tennyson’s importance was again recognized, and he continued to be appreciated
into the twenty-first century.
Robert Browning
Victorian poet
Robert Browning is chiefly remembered for his mastery of the dramatic monologue
and for the remarkable diversity and range of his works. By vividly portraying
a central character against a social background, his poems probe complex human
motives in a variety of historical periods. As a highly individual force in the
history of English poetry, Browning made significant innovations in language
and versification and had a profound influence on numerous twentieth-century
poets, including such key figures as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
Browning began to
write verses at the age of six. His first published work was Pauline:
A Fragment of a Confession (1833), which was issued anonymously. The
hero of the poem is a young poet, obviously Browning himself, who bares his
soul to a patient heroine. Although his next poem, Paracelsus (1835), did
not satisfy Browning, it brought favorable reviews and important friendships
with fellow poets William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle.
Browning also
became acquainted with the actor William C. Macready. Encouraged, Browning
turned to writing drama. Unfortunately, Browning’s first play, Strafford
(1837), closed after only five performances. During the next ten years,
Browning wrote six other plays, none of which were successfully produced.
In 1838, Browning
traveled to northern Italy to acquire firsthand knowledge of its setting and
atmosphere for his next long poem, Sordello (1840), but it, too, was panned
by critics who called it obscure and unreadable.
Despite their
overall lack of favorable attention, Browning’s works had famous admirers,
including Elizabeth Barrett, who was a respected and popular poet when in 1844
she praised Browning in one of her works and received a grateful letter from
him in response. The two met the following year, fell in love, and in 1846,
ignoring the disapproval of her father, eloped to Italy, where—except for brief
intervals—they spent all of their time together. It was there that their son,
Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning, was born in 1849. The Brownings lived in
Italy during the climax of the Risorgimento,
or the movement toward Italian unification, which culminated in the
establishment of the unified kingdom of Italy in 1861.
Dramatic Monologues and Mature Poetry:
In 1855, Browning published Men and Women, a collection of
fifty-one poems. Though the volume contained many of the dramatic monologues
that are best known and loved by modern readers, it was not popular with
Browning’s contemporaries. After gradually declining in health for several
years, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died on June 29, 1861. Browning found that he
could no longer remain in Florence because of the memories it held for him. He resolved
to ‘‘go to England, and live and work and write.’’ In 1864 he published Dramatis
Personae. Though some of the dramatic monologues in the collection are complex,
difficult, and too long, this was the first of Browning’s works to be popular
with the general reading public. His popularity increased with the publication
of The
Ring and the Book (1869). Enthusiastically received by the public, this
long poem, composed of twelve dramatic monologues in which the major characters
give their interpretations of a crime, resulted in Browning’s becoming a
prominent figure in London society.
Note:-
Browning is best
known for the dramatic monologue form in which a single speaker, who is not the
poet, speaks to someone within the context of the poem. That audience remains
silent during the monologue, creating a tension between what the speaker is
saying and what that audience may be thinking. Here are other works that use
the dramatic monologue form:
‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’
(1843), a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s famous short story is narrated
by a mentally unstable murderer.
‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’
(1917), a poem by T.S. Eliot. The insecure, aging Prufrock ponders his place in
the universe.
“Lady Lazarus’’ (1962), a poem
by Sylvia Plath. Plath explores the legacy of the Holocaust in this dark poem.
Fires in the Mirror (1992), a
play by Anna Deavere Smith. Smith weaves multiple monologues into this powerful
work that examines the various points of view surrounding the 1991 Crown
Heights riots in Brooklyn, New York.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth
Browning is recognized as a powerful voice of social criticism, as well as an
innovative poet whose experiments with rhyme and diction have influenced movements
in poetry throughout the years.
Although Barrett
Browning is best remembered today for Sonnets from the Portuguese, a
collection of love poems, she also wrote about social oppression with the same
depth of emotion.
Even with her
physical problems, Barrett continued to study and write, and she anonymously
published An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems in 1826. The volume established
what would become a theme in contemporary criticism—Barrett’s unusual, even
‘‘unwomanly,’’ scholarly knowledge. Barrett published Prometheus Bound: Translated from
the Greek of Aeschylus, and Miscellaneous Poems in 1833, again
anonymously, followed by The Seraphim, and Other Poems, the
first book published under her own name, in 1838. The collection attracted much
favorable attention.
Publication of
her 1844 two-volume collection Poems established Barrett as one of
the major poets of her day. The most important work of her life, however,
turned out to be a single poem. Barrett admired the work of Robert Browning, a
little-known poet six years her junior, and she expressed her appreciation of
him in a poem of her own. Browning responded in a letter to Barrett, the first
of 574 that they exchanged over the next twenty months. The letter began
abruptly: ‘‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.’’ He
continued, ‘‘I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart—and I love you
too.’’
Browning became a
frequent visitor, not only inspiring Barrett’s poetry but also encouraging her
to exercise outdoors to improve her health.
Sonnets from the Portuguese:
The courtship of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning inspired Barrett Browning’s
series of forty-four Petrarchan sonnets, recognized as one of the finest sonnet
sequences in English. Written during their 1845–1846 correspondence, Sonnets
from the
Portuguese remained Barrett Browning’s secret until 1849, when she presented
the collection to her husband. Despite his conviction that a writer’s private
life should remain sealed from the public, he felt the quality of these works
demanded publication. They appeared in Barrett Browning’s 1850 edition of Poems,
her personal history thinly concealed by a title that implies the poems are
translations.
Barrett
Browning’s subject matter became increasingly bold. ‘‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,’’ a dramatic monologue,
powerfully criticizes institutionalized slavery, showing herself to be in full sympathy
with the abolitionist movement in the United States. Casa Guidi Windows (1851)
records Barrett Browning’s reactions to the Italian struggle for unity. The
unification of the various Italian states into one country in 1861 was the
culmination of a movement known as the Risorgimento,
which was made up of a series of regional revolutions and struggles in Italy.
These were seen as a continuation of the American and French revolutions
decades earlier. Barrett Browning was in sympathy with the Italian
revolutionaries. The volume showed her increasing conviction that poetry should
be actively involved in life and, perhaps more importantly, her confidence that
a female poet should speak out about political and social issues. In this
respect, Barrett Browning differed from such English writers as Jane Austen,
Charlotte Bronte or Emily Bronte, all of whom seemed to avoid any mention of
world politics in their novels.
Her Aurora
Leigh (1856) is an ambitious novel in blank verse that embodies both
Barrett Browning’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. It bluntly argues that
the topic of ambitious poetry should not be the remote chivalry of a distant
past but the present day as
experienced by
ordinary people. Aurora Leigh achieves this goal of societal relevance, for it
deals with an array of pressing Victorian social problems such as the exploitation
of seamstresses, limited employment opportunities for women, sexual double
standards, drunkenness, domestic violence, schisms between economic and social
classes, and various plans for reform. Nothing stirred up more controversy than
Barrett Browning’s candid treatment of the situation of the ‘‘fallen woman’’—a
subject that was considered by the Victorian public to be outside the sight or
understanding of a serious novelist or poet.
Note: -
Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s work argued, in part, that women were as capable as men. Here are
some other works that argue for equality between the sexes:
A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791),
a nonfiction work by Mary Wollstonecraft. This text argues that women should
receive an education and similar rights to men.
The Woman in Her House
(1881), a nonfiction work by Concepcio n Arenal. In this book, the Spanish
feminist argues that women should aim to be more than simply wives and mothers.
Story of an African Farm
(1973), a novel by Mary Daly. The South African writer’s first novel tells of
three white children growing up in South Africa.
‘‘Ain’t I a Woman?’’ (1851),
by Sojourner Truth. This speech, given at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention by
a political activist and former slave, argues against the myth of the delicate
woman.
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold’s
work deals with the difficulty of preserving personal values in a world
drastically transformed by industrialism, science, and democracy. His poetry often
expresses a sense of unease with modernity. He asserted his greatest influence
through his prose writings as a social critic, calling for a renewal of art and
culture. His forceful literary criticism, based on his humanistic belief in the
value of balance and clarity in literature, significantly shaped modern theory.
Arnold’s poetic
landscapes also are indebted to the region around Oxford University, which
Arnold attended after being offered a scholarship in 1840. At Oxford he met
Arthur Hugh Clough, who became his close friend and correspondent. After leaving
Oxford, Arnold took a
temporary post as
assistant master at Rugby for one term before accepting a position in London as
private secretary to the politician Lord Lansdowne.
While holding
this position, Arnold wrote some of his finest poems. He published them, signed
with the initial A., in two separate volumes: The Strayed Reveller and Other
Poems (1849) and Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems
(1852). Arnold published the bulk of his poetry, including Poems in 1853, in the
eight years following the publication of The Strayed Reveller. However, his
best-known poem, ‘‘Dover Beach,’’ was
not published until 1867. The poem, often viewed as a meditation on the
importance of love, describes a locale on the coast of England that Arnold is
said to have visited in 1851.
Oxford Lectures: At the age of
thirty-four, Arnold was elected to the poetry chair at Oxford University, an appointment
that required him to deliver several lectures each year. Traditionally, the
lectures had been read in Latin, but Arnold decided to present his in English.
He used the occasion of his first lecture in 1857 to discuss his views about
the worth of classical literature. In the first lecture, entitled ‘‘On the Modern Element in Literature,’’
later published in Macmillan’s magazine
(1869), Arnold advocates a liberal education that features wide-ranging knowledge
and the use of the comparative method to build knowledge and to shape
understanding. Arnold’s next major prose work, On Translating Homer, was
a series of three lectures given at Oxford in 1860 and 1861. In these essays,
he evaluates selected translations of Homer, noting the strengths and
weaknesses of each in an attempt to establish the characteristics of a
well-written translation. They are lively introductions to classical poetry and
urge English writers to imitate Homer’s ‘‘grand
style.’’
Of the several
books that Arnold wrote on politics and sociology, the most important is Culture
and Anarchy (1869). He criticizes nineteenth-century English politicians
for their lack of purpose and their excessive concern with the machinery of
society. The English people—
and the
narrow-minded middle class in particular—lack ‘‘sweetness and light,’’ a phrase
that Arnold borrowed from Jonathan Swift. England can only be saved by the
development of ‘‘culture,’’ which for Arnold means the free play of critical
intelligence and a willingness to question all authority and to make judgments
in a leisurely and disinterested way.
The subject of
four of Arnold’s books was the threat to religion posed by science and
historical scholarship. The most important of these is Literature and Dogma (1873).
He argues that the Bible has the importance of a supremely great literary work,
and as such it cannot be discredited by charges of historical inaccuracy. And
the Church, like any other time-honored social institution, must be reformed
with care and with a sense of its historical importance to English culture. Arnold
focused on social and literary topics during the last ten to twelve years of
his life, offering more elaborate or definitive statements of his views on
matters that had long interested him. In 1883 and 1886 he toured the United
States and gave lectures in which he tried to win Americans to the cause of
culture.
Emptiness: One of the
dominant themes of Arnold’s poems is that of the intellectual and spiritual
void he believed to be characteristic of nineteenth-century life. Looking about
him, he witnessed the weakening of traditional areas of authority, namely the
dwindling power of the upper classes and the diminishing authority of the Church.
He believed man had no firm base to cling to, nothing to believe in, nothing to
be sustained by. Arnold’s early poetry, such as Alaric at Rome (1840), had the
brooding tone that would become characteristic of his mature work. In ‘‘To Marguerite—Continued,’’ he
concludes that the individual is essentially isolated. The theme of man’s
alienation and longing for refuge is echoed in later
poems such as ‘‘Rugby Chapel’’ and ‘‘Dover Beach.’’
Influences: For Arnold, the
German poet Heinrich Heine truly
possessed the critical spirit. Heine cherished the French spirit of
enlightenment and waged ‘‘a life and death battle with Philistinism,’’ the
narrowness Arnold saw typified in the British. Arnold felt that the English
romantics had
failed to reinstitute the critical spirit. The German romantic Heine, however,
he believed, was able to accomplish what the English romantics could not. Despite
his criticism, however, the two romantics Arnold held in highest esteem were Lord
Byron and William Wordsworth. He praised Byron at length for his stand on
social injustice, and ranked Wordsworth only after William Shakespeare,
Moliere, John Milton, and Johann von Goethe in his list of the premier poets of
‘‘the last two or three centuries.’’
Poetry: As E. D. H.
Johnson has pointed out, Arnold tried ‘‘to reaffirm the traditional sovereignty
of poetry as a civilizing agent.’’ Arnold believed that great art, functioning as
a civilizing agent to enrich the intellectual and spiritual life of man, had
universal application. But his views were not the same as those of his
contemporaries, who felt that art should have immediate, practical application to
everyday experience.
Charles
Kingsley’s comments in 1849 are representative: ‘‘The man who cannot . . . sing
the present age, and transfigure it into melody, or who cannot, in writing of
past ages, draw from them some eternal lesson about this one, has no ight to be
versifying at all.’’
Poems
(1853) included works from the two earlier collections as well as new ones,
notably ‘‘Sohrab and Rustum’’ and ‘‘The Scholar Gypsy.’’ That volume
contains his famous preface outlining why he did not include the title poem
from Empedocles
on Etna, and Other Poems. Arnold declared that it did not fulfill the
requirements of a good poem and therefore did not qualify as meaningful art.
Alba Warren explains that ‘‘great poetry for Arnold is not lyric, subjective,
personal; it is above all objective and impersonal.’’ H. F. Lowry says of
Arnold that ‘‘[t]he deepest passion of his life was for what is permanent in
the human mind and the human heart,’’ and that he found this in classical
literature. Because, perhaps, of the mournful tone of his verse, Arnold was not
a popular poet in his day. However, many of his poems—most notably ‘‘The Scholar-Gypsy,’’ ‘‘Empedocles on
Etna,’’ ‘‘Thyrsis,’’ and ‘‘Dover
Beach’’— are still studied and respected as some of the best verse of the
Victorian period. T. S. Eliot stated that ‘‘the valuation of the Romantic
poets, in academic circles, is still very largely that which Arnold made.’’
‘‘Culture and Its Enemies:’’
In ‘‘Culture and Its Enemies,’’
published in the Cornhill Magazine in
1867 and later included in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold
continues to wage war against complacency. However, his views were met with
considerable scorn. Readers claimed that he was an elitist, a snob, and they
labeled his ideas inadequately developed and impractical. Henry Sidgwick found
the essay ‘‘over-ambitious, because it treats of the most profound and
difficult problems of individual and social life with an airy dogmatism that
ignores their depth and difficulty.’’
Arnold responded
to his critics in a series of five essays published in 1868, entitled ‘‘Anarchy and Authority.’’ In the essay
series Arnold continues his championship of culture by stressing the present
need for it.
Arnold also
championed religion as a profound cultural force. However, Ruth Roberts shows
that Arnold is guilty of ‘‘over-ingenuity’’ in his religious works. His
argument is not as disinterested as he claims, and he often glosses over
biblical passages inconsistent with his position. For Arnold, the Bible was literature
and must be read as such. J. C. Shairp, a contemporary of Arnold’s, argued,
‘‘They who seek religion for culture-sake are aesthetic, not religious.’’ The
same charge was later echoed by T. S. Eliot, who found that Arnold had confused
‘‘poetry and morals in the attempt to find a substitute for religious faith.’’
Basil Willey
summarized Arnold’s view in Literature and Dogma as being a
‘‘false approach to the Bible which seeks to extract dogma from poetry.’’
Unsurprisingly, Literature and Dogma stirred even more controversy than his
previous religious works.
‘‘The Study of Poetry:’’
One of Arnold’s most important later essays, ‘‘The Study of Poetry,’’ first appeared in 1880 as the introduction
to The
English Poets, an anthology edited by T. Humphry Ward. R. H. Super
reminds that the essay was intended ‘‘to give some guidance to a middle-class
public not sophisticated in the reading of poetry.’’ ‘‘The Study of Poetry’’ no more remained unchallenged than had any
of Arnold’s other works. Many, including contemporary critics, have disagreed with
Arnold’s choice of touchstone passages, and many have taken offense at Arnold’s
pronouncements about the merits of individual authors. Despite such objections,
the essay remains an historically important piece of criticism and an important
guide to Arnold’s own tastes.
Note:-
Anxiety about the
rapidly changing world characterized much of Victorian literature and is a
theme echoed in Arnold’s poetry. He evokes feelings of isolation, loneliness,
and fear of the future. Recent scientific discoveries made people question
religion’s place in their lives, but without religion, people are essentially alone.
Here are some other works that examine feelings of isolation and emptiness:
Catcher in the Rye by J. D.
Salinger. Three days in the life of an alienated teenage boy, who rebels
against the smug adult world.
Lament for the Dorsets
by Al Purdy. Elegy for a civilization that died out because it was unable to
survive in changing conditions.
Madame Bovary by Gustave
Flaubert. A middle-class woman struggles to find fulfillment through a
realization of her romantic fantasies of love and wealth.
Shizuko’s Daughter by Kyoko
Mori. Growing up in Japan, a girl is lonely, partly because she does not relate
to others who accept their status in life without questioning it.
Siddhartha by Hermann
Hesse. A wealthy yet spiritually empty Hindu goes on a quest to explore the
deepest meaning of life and the self.
Edward Fitzgerald
Like Thomas Gray,
he lives in general literature by one poem. Edward FitzGerald translated the Persian
manuscript of Khayyam’s verse into English in 1859 did the Western world
discover Khayyam’s lyrics.
Today, Khayyam’s
Ruba iyat, a collection of quatrains composed in the traditional Persian rubai
style, is recognized throughout the West. Both sensual and spiritual, the
Rubaiyat has remained powerfully poignant because it appeals to humankind’s
deepest passions and most profound philosophical concerns.
Fitzgerald also
wrote a prose dialogue of much beauty called Euphranor: a Dialogue on
Youth (1851); and his surviving letters testify to his quiet and
caustic humour.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The most
important of his works are Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea
(1834-35), based upon his earliest travels; Voices of the Night
(1839), a collection that includes some of his best shorter poems; Evangeline
(1847), a tragical story of the early colonial days, written in smooth and melodious
hexameters; The Song of Hiawatha (1855), a collection of Indian folk-tales,
written in unrhymed octosyllabic verse; The Courtship of Miles Standish
(1858); and Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Equally renowned
as a painter and a poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the leader of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists and writers who sought to
emulate the purity and simplicity of the medieval period. Both his painting and
writing are characterized by mysticism, filled with rich, sensuous imagery and
vivid detail.
Although the
subjects of his verse are often considered narrow, Rossetti is an acknowledged
master of the ballad and sonnet forms.
He was born in
London, the son of an Italian refugee who was professor of Italian at King's
College, where
Rossetti received his early education. He began to compose poetry by the time
he was six, and later studied drawing at the Royal Academy School (1846). In
1848, Rossetti joined John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt in founding
the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
Their name honored Carlo Lasinio’s engravings of paintings by Benozzo Gozzoli
(an Italian Renaissance painter from Florence) and others who decorated Pisa’s
Campo Santo (originally used as a cemetery for Pisa’s illustrious citizens).
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to introduce new forms of thematic
seriousness, high coloration, and attention to detail into contemporary British
art. They were opposed to the stale conventions of contemporary academy art,
which drew on classical poses and the compositions of the Italian High
Renaissance painter Raphael.
Ruskin, Swinburne
and William Morris were among his later friends, and Ruskin was of considerable
financial assistance to him.
Success as a Poet
Rossetti first received recognition as a poet in 1850, when he published ‘‘The Blessed Damozel,’’ in the
Pre-Raphaelite journal the Germ. Written when he was only eighteen, this poem
is characteristic of much of Rossetti’s later poetry, with its sensuous detail and
theme of lovers, parted by death, who long for reunion. That same year,
Rossetti met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who modeled for many of Rossetti’s
drawings and paintings and became his wife in 1860.
Following the
publication of Poems, numerous reviews appeared praising Rossetti as the
greatest poet since Shakespeare. However, in 1871, critic Robert Buchanan
pseudonymously published a venomous attack against Rossetti, in which he
claimed that Rossetti’s only artistic aim was ‘‘to extol fleshliness as the
distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that poetic
expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body is
greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.’’
Rossetti
published a convincing reply called ‘‘The
Stealthy School of Criticism.’’ Buchanan then expanded his views in The
Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day. In this work,
he added a lengthy attack on ‘‘The House of Life’’ as a ‘‘hotbed’’ of ‘‘nasty phrases,’’
which virtually ‘‘wheel[ed]’’ the poet’s ‘‘nuptial couch into the public
streets.’’
He continued to
paint and write even after a personal change and mental breakdown caused by an attack on
his poetry by Robert Buchanan in The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other
Phenomena of the Day (1872). Rossetti’s poetry collection, Ballads
and Sonnets, appeared in 1881, and he died the following year at the
age of fifty-four.
Note:-
Rossetti’s poetry
is characterized by its mysticism, its rich and sensuous imagery, and its vivid
detail. Here are some other works which have similar themes:
Idylls of the King
(1856–1885), poems by Alfred Tennyson. This cycle of twelve narrative poems
retells the legend of King Arthur with vibrant descriptions of nature derived
from the author’s own observations of his surroundings.
The Eve of St. Agnes (1820),
by John Keats. This long poem tells the story of Madeline and Porphyro, whose romance
‘‘falls’’ from innocence to experience.
American Primitive (1984),
poems by Mary Oliver. This Pulitzer Prize–winning collection allows the reader
to devour luscious objects and substances through powerful recurring images of
ingestion.
The Burning Alphabet (2005),
poems by Barry Dempster. This collection combines a sense of humor with
sensuous writing.
Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
was a younger sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. One of the English language’s
best-known female poets, British author Christina Rossetti is remembered for
her literary inheritance as much as for her literary contributions. Rossetti,
whose work gained renewed interest with the dawn of feminist criticism, was an
important member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, an artistic and literary group
that aspired to recapture the aesthetics of Italian religious painting before
the Renaissance painter Raphael.
In her
exploration of themes including death, female creativity, sisterhood, and
unrequited love, Rossetti became the voice of Victorian womanhood. Her work is now
celebrated as much for its innovation and beauty as for its feminine
perspective.
First Publications: Rossetti
had collected over fifty poems by the age of sixteen, thirty-nine of which were
privately printed as Verses in 1847. Encouraged by her brothers,
Rossetti sought wider publication and began to experiment with a blend of
allegory and fantasy.
Preoccupied with
religious questions, Rossetti continued to write poetry, even venturing into
prose for her 1850 novel Maude: A Story for Girls, which was
published after her death. Meanwhile, her family’s fortunes continued to
suffer. By the time her father died in April 1854, she was dependent on her
brother William for support.
Around this time,
Rossetti volunteered at an institution for fallen women (such as prostitutes,
unmarried mothers, and homeless women), where she became interested in the
fates of women with compromised morals, a subject she explored in her later
poetry. The Victorian era in England, so named because of its long-serving
monarch, Queen Victoria, was marked by a spirit of reform and social justice.
Reform laws of the period enfranchised the new middle class and the working
class, while humanitarian legislation did away with some of the more outrageous
abuses of the poor and improved conditions forthose who worked in factories.
The reformation of fallen women was part of such concerns.
Literary Fame: Though some of
her poems were published in magazines during the 1850s, most of Rossetti’s work
was not commercially published until 1862, when her most famous work, Goblin
Market, and Other Poems, appeared. The book’s namesake, ‘‘Goblin Market,’’ is a long poem that
depicts two sisters’ struggle with teasing goblins who drive them mad with
forbidden fruit. The poem has become Rossetti’s most famous, drawing feminist,
Marxist, social, and psychoanalytic analyses from various critics. Other poems
in the collection grapple with questions of vulnerability, femininity, and
sisterhood. Goblin Market, and Other Poems gained Rossetti fame and praise
and has remained popular due to its skill and subject matter. It is hence her
most famous work. Featuring a nursery-rhyme style and a ghoulish story of
temptation, seduction, and salvation, the poem has gained attention for its
exploration of sisterhood (feminist critiques), its sexual content
(psychological critiques), its exploration of fallen women (social and cultural
critiques), and even its vision of women as goods in a marketplace (Marxist
critiques). It appeared to general praise, garnering a reputation as a work of
literary genius and receiving wide attention in the newspapers and literary
journals of its time. Its publication did not interrupt Rossetti’s life. In the
years following the publication of Goblin Market, and Other Poems, she
turned down her second marriage proposal on religious grounds, recovered from a
lung disease later thought to be tuberculosis (a contagious lung disease that
was often fatal at that time), and began work on her next collection. The
Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems appeared in 1866 with illustrations
provided by her brother Dante Gabriel. Her next work, Commonplace, and Other Short
Stories (1870), marked her first experiments with short fiction. Though
the book of sophisticated literary fairy tales failed commercially, critics still
find stories like ‘‘Nick’’ and ‘‘Hero’’ notable.
Popular Books for Children:
After battling Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disease that causes overactivity
of the thyroid gland, Rossetti was weak and exhausted. Nevertheless, she kept
writing, this time producing a book of children’s poetry called Sing-Song:
A Nursery Rhyme Book
(1872). The book, which was accompanied by Pre-Raphaelite illustrations by
Arthur Hughes, is considered one of the most significant works of nineteenth
century children’s verse. Spurred on by the book’s popularity, Rossetti next
published Speaking Likenesses (1874), a collection of warped, terrifying
fairy tales. Though many critics dismiss A Pageant, and Other Poems (1881) as
one of Rossetti’s weakest works, the book represented a break for Rossetti. In
her ‘‘Monna Innominata’’ love
sonnets, Rossetti explored love with a sense of regret
and sadness that some consider to be characteristic of Victorian womanhood.
(During the Victorian era, there were many pressures placed on women to live up
to an impossible ideal.) As a woman writing in a field dominated by men,
Rossetti explored love in unconventional ways, combining questions about
romance with speculation about a romantic union with God.
Rossetti has long
been considered one of the Victorian era’s most important female poets. She
drew inspiration from the religious writing of such poets as Dante and Milton,
as well as influenced writers as diverse as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, Charlotte Mew, Virginia Woolf, and e. e. cummings. Aligned with
the Pre-Raphaelite movement during her lifetime, Rossetti was considered to be
one of her age’s greatest poets and was praised as England’s new female
laureate when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in the 1860s. While readers have
generally judged Rossetti’s poetry to be less political and intellectual than
that of Barrett Browning, they do recognize Rossetti as the more talented
lyricist, her poetry displaying precision in diction, form, and tone.
Note:-
Rossetti’s
writings for children retold popular fairy tales in imaginatively different
ways. Here is a list of other fairy tales, legends, and children’s stories that
have been reworked from diverse perspectives:
The Penelopiad (2005), a
novella by Margaret Atwood. Atwood retells the events of the Greek epic the
Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus’s wife Penelope.
Grendel (1971), a novel
by John Gardner. In this novel, Gardner retells the Anglo-Saxon story of
Beowulf the warrior from the point of view of Grendel, one of the ‘‘monsters’’
that Beowulf fights.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of
the West (1995), a novel by Gregory Maguire. This novel presents the story
of the early life of the Wicked Witch of
the West of The Wizard of Oz (1900).
Enchanted (2007), a film
directed by Kevin Lima. Through the story about a modern-day princess’s search
for love in New York City, this movie satirizes traditional ‘‘beautiful princess’’
interpretations of fairy tales.
The Stinky Cheese
Man, and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992), a
collection of stories by Jon Scieszka. This assortment of fractured fairy tales
is filled with sarcastic humor.
William Morris
Morris, an
English artist and writer, founded the British arts and crafts movement, which
originated as a reaction against the mass production made possible by the
Industrial Revolution.The bulk of Morris's poetry was written during the first
forty-five years of his life.
The Defence of
Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) shows his
love of beauty of colour, sound, and scenery, and his passion for the medieval.
In construction the poems of this volume are often faulty, and in style they
have an abrupt roughness which is not seen in his later work.
The Life and
Death of Jason (1867), a heroic poem on a familiar
theme, is told in smooth, easy couplets, and has the melancholy tone so common
in Morris.
The Earthly
Paradise (1868-70) is a collection of tales, some
classical, some medieval. In language and the predominance of the couplet they
show the influence of Chaucer, though the languid harmony of Morris contrasts
strongly with the racy vitality of his model. The best poetry in this work is
to be found in the interspersed lyrics. His finest long narrative poem, The
Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the
Fall of the Niblungs (1877), is based on the Norse sagas, and has great
vigour of language and rhythm, combined with fine descriptive passages. Poems
by the Way (1891) contains some good miscellaneous pieces.
The literary
production of the second part of Morris's life consisted mainly of prose romances,
lectures, and articles. The best of his lectures are to be found in Hopes
and Fears for Art (1882) and Signs of Change (1888), and his
socialist political hopes for the regeneration of English life find their
fullest expression in A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News
from Nowhere (1891). These same aspirations are always felt in the prose
romances to which he devoted the last years of his life. Among them are A
Tale of the House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains
(1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), and The
Sundering Flood (1898).
Morris's work
reflects several strong influences: the interest in the medieval which drew him
into the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; his reverence for Chaucer; his love of Icelandic
saga, which combined with Chaucer to give his style an archaic flavour; and his
socialist idealism. Like Rossetti, he had the artist's passion for beauty,
which finds its best expression in his fine English landscapes and the rich,
tapestried descriptions of his narrative poems.
Swinburne was one
of the most accomplished lyric poets of the Victorian era and was a preeminent
symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. The explicit
and often pathological sexual themes of his most important collection of
poetry, Poems and Ballads (1866), delighted some, shocked many, and
became the dominant feature of Swinburne’s image as both an artist and an
individual.
He achieved his
first literary success in 1865 with Atalanta in Calydon, which was
written in the form of classical Greek tragedy. The following year the
appearance of Poems and Ballads brought Swinburne instant notoriety. He
became identified with the ‘‘indecent’’ themes and the precept of ‘‘art for
art’s sake’’ that characterized many of the poems in the volume. He
subsequently wrote poetry of many different kinds, including the militantly
republican Song of Italy (1867) and Songs Before Sunrise (1871) in
support of the Risorgimento, the movement
for Italian political unity. Although individual volumes of Swinburne’s poetry
were occasionally well received, in general his popularity and critical
reputation declined following the initial sensation of Poems and Ballads.
Swinburne is regarded as a
Victorian poet profoundly at odds with his age and as one of the most daring,
innovative, and brilliant lyricists to ever write in English. Certainly, he
shocked and outraged Victorian sensibility, introducing into the pious, stolid
age a world of fierce atheism, strange passions, fiery paganism, and a
magnificent new lyrical voice the likes of which had never before been heard.
His radical republicanism, a worship of the best instincts of man, pushed
Victorian humanism well beyond the ‘‘respectable’’ limits of Matthew Arnold’s writings.
Additionally, his critical writings on art and literature greatly influenced
the aesthetic climate of his age, and his extraordinary imitative facility made
him a brilliant, unrivaled parodist. But most important, the expression of his
eroticism in many poems about nature, particularly about the sea, wind, and
sun, make him the Victorian period’s greatest heir of the Romantic poets.
A Novelist: One of
Swinburne’s most significant prose works is the satiric epistolary novel of
1862, A Year’s Letters (pseudonymously serialized in Tatler in 1877). A Year’s Letters is a
masterful, more or less autobiographical account of the aristocratic Victorian
world that shaped Swinburne’s character, ‘‘a world,’’ writes Edmund Wilson in The Novels
of A. C. Swinburne (1962), ‘‘in which the eager enjoyment of a glorious
out-of-door life of riding and swimming and boating is combined with adultery, incest,
enthusiastic flagellation and quiet homosexuality.’’
Literary Critic: Throughout his
career, Swinburne also published literary criticism of great acuity. His
familiarity with a wide range of world literatures contributed to a critical
style rich in quotation, allusion, and comparison. He is particularly noted for
discerning studies of Elizabethan dramatists and of many English and French poets
and novelists. In response to criticism of his own works, Swinburne wrote
essays, including Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866) and Under the Microscope
(1872), that are celebrated for their wit and insight. Swinburne also left a second novel, Lesbia
Brandon, unfinished at his death. Some critics have theorized that Lesbia
Brandon was intended as thinly disguised autobiography; however, its
fragmentary form resists conclusive interpretation.
‘‘On the Cliffs:’’ One of
Swinburne’s finest poems, ‘‘On the
Cliffs,’’ was written at Holmwood in 1879, shortly after Watts-Dunton had
rescued Swinburne from his rooms on Guildford Street. The poem approaches spiritual
autobiography, which expresses the themes of Poems and Ballads, Second Series
(1885) in a richly complex and precise syntax. The setting, as in ‘‘The Forsaken Garden’’ and later ‘‘By the North Sea,’’ is a crumbling
cliff that is being slowly eaten away by the sea—Swinburne’s favorite image for
his belief that all earthly life, even the Earth itself, is destined for
oblivion. Some critics in the early twentieth century dismissed Swinburne’s
nature poetry as ornamental and obscure, even verbose. They remarked, as noted
in a Swinburne study by scholar David Riede, on the difficulty of Swinburne’s
‘‘syntactical maze of modifying clauses and phrases’’ as well as his
complicated literary
allusion. Riede also suggests some critics dismissed Swinburne’s ‘‘On the Cliffs’’ due to its meaning:
the reader seems to always be in ‘‘continual doubt.’’
Bothwell: In 1874 an
anonymous reviewer in Macmillan’s Magazine,
writing on Swinburne’s Bothwell, praised the dramatist’s ‘‘strength and sweep
of imagination’’ and suggested the play succeeds because Swinburne is ‘‘as much
scholar as poet.’’ The reviewer goes on to laud Swinburne’s attention to
history and his seriousness regarding the play’s subject. George Saintsbury, in
an 1874 issue of The Academy, also appreciated Bothwell, cheering its lyrical
power and elevating its author to ‘‘the heights of the English Parnassus.’’
Much more grounded in their
analysis, twentieth-century critics like Curtis Dahl looked to Bothwell and the
rest of Swinburne’s trilogy on Mary, Queen of Scots as an autobiographical/ biographical
study. They believed the trilogy sheds new insight into how Swinburne saw
himself at the time of
publication.
Note: -
Poems and Ballads
and A
Year’s Letters are seen by many as obscene and offensive, though they
are also acknowledged classics. Here are a few more examples of significant
literary classics that were considered immoral when first published:
Aeropagitica
(1644), a nonfiction work by John Milton. This treatise condemning censorship
makes the case—coming from one of literature’s most passionate defenders of
Christian theology—that morality is only possible as a choice for those who
have some minimal, albeit accidental, sense (even an imaginary sense) of immorality.
It should be noted, however, that Milton was making the case for freedom of
speech with the explicit goal of working toward a fuller understanding of the
Christian God.
Tropic of Cancer (1961), a novel
by Henry Miller. The publication of this novel led to a series of obscenity
trials that tested American laws on pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court
overruled state court findings of obscenity and declared the book a work of
literature. The Modern Library named it the fiftieth-best book of the twentieth
century.
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
(1928), a novel by D. H. Lawrence. This novel was originally to be called
‘‘Tenderness,’’ and met with scandal on account of its explicit sex scenes, which
included previously banned words. A portion of the outrage with which the
novel’s publication met may also have derived from the fact that the lovers
were a working-class male and an aristocratic female. It is generally considered
a classic of English literature.
Next –
The Victorian Age - II
Works Cited
English Literature by Edward
Albert [Revised by J. A. Stone]
History of English Literature,
by Legouis and Cazamian
The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain
and Ireland, by Ronald Carter and John McRae
Gale’s Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature
Image courtesy: avictorian.com
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