Name::- Sneha Agravat
Batch:- 2020-22 (MA sem 1)
Paper 5:- History of English Literature
Topic name:- Victorian Poets
Roll no.:-17
Enrollment no.:-3069206420200001
E-mail Id :- snehaagravat2000@gmail.com
Submitted to:- S.B.Gardi Department Of English Maharaja krishnkumarsinhji Bhavngar University
Victorian Poets:-
Introduction:-
The poetic temper of the Victorian Age is not materially different from that of the early 19th century. In its individualism, play of imagination, love of the picturesque, and interest in Nature and the past, it continues the romantic tradition. But in its response to the changed conditions -- political, economic, and scientific and religions -- it no doubt acquired a distinctive character of its own. The Victorian poets lived in the world of their day which looked up to them for guidance. Democracy introduced a new face; science banished God from the universe; and religion therefore had little useful role to play. Upon what platform would England stand then? Tennyson, Browning and Arnold came to her rescue. Each came out with a message of his own to reassure his readers that their doubts, distractions and fears were all right with the world. The poets turned prophets too. Victorian poetry came to be related more to life than the romantic. It is the voice of Victorian England.
Victorian Poets:-
The poets of this age may be classified as follows: the major poets, Tennyson and Browning, Who are often compared and contrasted; the skeptics who include Arnold, clough, Fitzgerald and games Thompson; the Pre -Raphaelites consisting chiefly of D. G. Rossetti ; and the ' Decadents'. In each the trends of the age expressed themselves in different ways. For a precise treatment of the topic, we here choose only three major representative poets -- Tennyson, Browning and the woman poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wife of Robert Browning.
From the rich imagery and rhythmic quality of Alfred Lord Tennyson to Christina Rossetti’s lyrical purity and powerful exploration of loss and faith, the Victorian period heralded a new wave of poetry that was influenced by its Romantic predecessors yet distinctly different. How did the Victorian poets approach composition, form and language, and what inspired their subjects?Victorian poets are also known as later nineteenth-century poets. Most of the writing of this period reflects current social, economic, and intellectual problems. The poetry of this period shows the crisis of religion and philosophy because of the development of science.
Let's see some Major poets and his contribution in victorian era:-
1)Alfred Lord Tennyson:-
Tennyson is one of the most skilled and self-conscious poets of the Victorian age. He is typical Victorian who adopted the conventionalreligious and social views and values of his age. His early poems were not much accepted, but gradually he sharpened his skill.
Tennyson's later poems are serious, thoughtful and musical. His poem The Idylls of the King is preferred by many people even today. In Morte D Arthur he turned Malory’s story into poetry. He did experiment with different meters. In his long poem In Memoriam he laments for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson’s shorter poems are generally better than longer ones. Ulysses is his most controlled and perfectly written poem which presents the heroic voice of the aged hero. The Princess is the collection of his fine lyric which shows his best mysterious and musical quality.
Notable works:-
The Princess
Ulysses
Mariana
In Memoriam
Idylls of the King
Locksley Hall
Enoch Arden
The Lady of Shalott
2)Robert Browning:-
Browning is a major Victorian poet who voiced the mood of optimism in his works. For Browning the intellect was more important than the music. His great knowledge was the result of his self-study and travels. His reputation is higher as the writer of dramatic monologue. One of his successful dramatic poems is Pippa Passes. We find many such poems in his dramas, but his natural gift was in poetry. Sometimes we notice his poetic style very difficult. It is because of his unusual knowledge of words and his strange sentence structure. Sordello is a good example of his difficult poem. The Ring and the Book is a poem based on a book that he found in Florence. Asolando is a collection of many fine poems which was published on the day of Browning death.
Notable works:-
The Ring and the Book
“Fra Lippo Lippi”
“My Last Duchess”
“Sordello”
“The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
“The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church”
“Pippa Passes”
“Rabbi Ben Ezra”
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology”
“Paracelsus”
3)Matthew Arnold:-
Arnold was a great poet and critic of his time. He had been a professor of poetry in Oxford for ten years. His works truly represent his age. A sad undertone runs through nearly all his poetry. His views of modern life, of its complexity, its sick hurry and divided aims are present in his poetry.
Arnold was also the headmaster of Rugby School. He wrote a poem entitled Rugby Chapel. Thyrsis is a poem of lament for his friend, Clough. In his poem The Scholar Gipsy the poet talks about an Oxford man who joins a band of gypsies and wanders with them. Memorial Verses is his sad poem in which the poet laments for the deaths of many poets at home and abroad. He also wrote a critical sonnet of Shakespeare, whom he praised too much. One of his other poems, Empedocles on Etna, has been highly praised, perhaps because it is not altogether sad.
Notable works:-
“Culture and Anarchy”
“Sohrab and Rustum”
“Empedocles on Etna”
“Thyrsis”
“The Scholar Gipsy”
“The Forsaken Merman”
“Dover Beach”
“The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems”
“The Study of Poetry”
“On the Study of Celtic Literature”
4)Dante Gabriel Rossetti:-
Rossetti was a poet as well as a noted painter. His sonnets are among the most musical in English. Many critics have accused him of writing a moral poems belonging to the Fleshy School of poetry. But he argued that poetry ought to be based on the senses. Many of his poetic lines are written in a way a painter’s eye captures the beauty of the thing. Rosseti wrote about nature with his eye on it, but did not feel it in his bones as Wordsworth does. Rossetti was too fond of alliteration.
Notable works:-
“The House of Life”
“Poems”
“The Blessed Damozel”
5)Elizabeth Barrett Browning:-
Another great poetess of this time was Elizabeth Barrett, who, on her marriage, became Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Some of her poems are too long, but in a sonnet she could not write too much because the form is limited to fourteen lines. Thus much of her best work is contained in Sonnets from the Portuguese. She pretended at first that these sonnets were translated from the Portuguese; they were really an entirely original expression of her love for Robert Browning.
NOTABLE WORKS:-
“Sonnets from the Portuguese”
“Aurora Leigh”
“Poems Before Congress”
“Casa Guidi Windows”
6)Algernon Charles Swinburne:-
Swinburne followed the poetic style of Rossetti, but could not use alliteration so much successfully in his poems as did Rossetti. Critics argue that his poetry does not contain much thought, though it can be sung well. When his work Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866, he was much blamed for moral reasons. A later book of Poems and Ballads is not so much offensive as the previous one. It shows his interest in French writers and includes the laments for them. Tristram of Lyonesse is usually considered to be his best work. It tells the undying story of Tristram and Iseult.
NOTABLE WORKS:-
“Poems and Ballads”
“Atalanta in Calydon”
7) Edward Fitzgerald:-
One of the greatest poetic translators was Edward Fitzgerald. He translated six of Calderon’s plays the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Most translations lose something and are not as good as the originals. But this book is considered by some Persian scholars to be better than Omar Khayyam’s work. In this translation of the Rubaiyat, he entirely omitted the hidden meanings of the original. The other poets of this age are Arthur Clough, and Christina Rossetti.
Notable works:-
1)“The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”
8)Fleshly School of Poetry or the Pre-Raphaelites:-
The Fleshly School Poets or the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired by the Italian painters before Raphael. In 1848, a group of three young painters, who were also poets, founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. They followed a medieval outlook, art for the sake of art, sensuous and clear word painting, and a poetry rich in music and melody. Due to their detailed description of scene and situation, and the frank and free dealing of sexual passion, they are also referred to as the ‘Fleshly School’.
D. G. Rossetti was the chief among these young poets, as well as painters. He is sometimes criticized as a fleshly poet because his poems contain sensuous pictures of feminine beauty. But he combines the physical beauty with spiritual beauty in The Blessed Demozel. He also wrote about nature, but instead of feeling like Wordsworth, he studied it. He was also fond of alliteration, as in “flying hair and fluttering hem”.
A. C. Swinburne was a follower of D. G. Rossetti, but he misused alliteration. He wrote much political verse, but he had a new rich music in his verse drama Atlanta in Calydon. Though his music is good, there is a lack of thought in his poetry. He was also criticized for moral reasons when his Poems and Ballads was published in 1866. His best work is considered to be Tristram of Lyonese.
William Morris was also influenced by Rossetti. His early works The Defense of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867), and The Earthly Paradise (1870) are purely romantic in method and style, with an undertone of sadness.
In retrospect we can see that these attempts to bring a double awareness within the compass of a single imaginative vision were destined to failure. Modern society has made the roles of man of letters and artist mutually irreconcilable without a loss in commitment on one side or the other. The fact of communication presupposes a common language; and as Arnold knew, it is the business of the man of letters to help formulate that language, whereas the artist must speak with his own voice. Under the favoring circumstances of a homogeneous culture (for which Arnold's term was an "epoch of concentration"), the artist may find his public waiting; but when the center falls apart, the dialogue of the mind with itself sustains him. By seeking their audience rather than letting it find them, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold split their allegiance and partially disengaged themselves from the life of the imagination. The resultant access in prestige and influence involved a fatal loss in artistic status. Their inherent poetic resources only serve to accentuate how great this loss was.
But the real influence of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold has operated subterraneously. If their outer awareness took undue cognizance of the surface ripples of Victorian life, they were inwardly aware of the deep ground-swells of change. The individual perceptions, whose concealed operation we have identified in their poetry, were to become the leading motifs of subsequent literary movements. Tennyson's "other life" of dreams foreshadows psychological theories of the imagination and accords with modern thinking about the creative process. Through his reduction of human behavior to its instinctual components Browning anticipates the emergence of modern primitivism. And Arnold's account of the deracinated artist continues to be an obsessive theme in contemporary writing. But such insights were alien to the pretensions of the society which gave rise to them. Because, however hard they tried, they could not simultaneously inhabit the worlds of the imagination and of Victorian society, a split opened, dividing the artistic awareness of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. Their failure to close this breach confirmed the alienation of the modern artist.
Conclusion:-
In sum up we can say thatThe era ended in 1901, when Queen Victoria died. The Victorian Era still lives on today through music, literature, and art. This era will always be remembered as a great time in history when Queen Victoria ruled.All things considered, it is remarkable that Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold should have put so much of themselves into their poetry as they did, and still commanded the admiration of their age. Three possible explanations for this popularity may be proposed. Either the Victorians, like Browning's Caliban, were self-infatuated to the extent of making over their poets in their own image. Or we today have inherited a very distorted conception of Victorian habits of mind. Or, finally, Victorian artists were more successful in communicating with their audience on a high imaginative plane than has been recognized. Probably there is a measure of truth in each of these assumptions. In any event, we are [215/216] left with the realization that a body of poetry, ostensibly aimed at its age, carries in its depths an enormous burden of implication alien to that age.
References:-
1)Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Algernon Charles Swinburne". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Apr. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Algernon-Charles-Swinburne. Accessed 12 February 2021.
2)Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Edward FitzGerald". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Jun. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-FitzGerald. Accessed 12 February 2021.
3)Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning". Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Dec. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-Barrett-Browning. Accessed 12 February 2021.
4)Drew, Philip. "Robert Browning". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Dec. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Browning. Accessed 12 February 2021.
5)Gaunt, William and Bryson, John. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 May. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dante-Gabriel-Rossetti. Accessed 12 February 2021.
6)Robson, William Wallace. "Alfred, Lord Tennyson". Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Oct. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Lord-Tennyson. Accessed 12 February 2021.
7)“Victorian Poets.” Sharma, K.N, Jan. 2014, www.bachelorandmaster.com/englishperiods/victorian-poets.html#.YCYVchhN2Nx.
8)Willey, Basil. "Matthew Arnold". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Dec. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Matthew-Arnold. Accessed 12 February 2021.
Word count:- 2138
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