Victorian Poetry Flashcards
Name two poets whose work overlapped the division between the Romantic and Victorian periods
John Clare (1793-1864) and Savage Landor (1775-1864)
Victorian poets can be regarded as returning to their cultural inheritance in order to
draw strength from it to meet new challenges. (E.g. freedom of word order; antiquarian uses of Tudor or medieval words like “puissance,” “twain,” etc.)
Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. displays his temperamental passivity–his
endurance of helplessness
In Memoriam A.H.H. is both a religious poem and a
poem of doubt (its strength lies in being both)
Victorian retrospection became an explicit programme for the ___-_________ movement in literature and art. This elevated the ______ _____, with their scrupulous detail and “strict adherence to nature” as a model of true creativity.
pre-Raphaelite; Middle Ages
What poet marks the landmark–and quarry–of lyricism (lyricism could go no further.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
Robert Browning did more than any Victorian poet to
modernize poetry
Browning (1812-89) was to mark a point of departure for the modernist movement. He perpetually
experimented and innovated
Browning is said to have had “a taste for…
“ugly reality” (Walter Bagehot)
Browning invented a type of poem (later popular with the Georgians) which has a simple direct surface meaning, but also contains
digressions or apparently gratuitous elements, tangentially related to the rest.
Antecedents to the Browningesque monologue include Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824-9) and also
Donne’s Satires (Browning was unusual for his time in admiring Donne.
Browning’s dramatic monologues had a prodigious influence, and may be suspected in in
the Jamesian novel
By concealing the poet within deliberately ambiguous situations, Browning’s poems force
the reader to respond on his own–poetry that made way for Henry James and modernist fiction
Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) is a verse novel based on a late 17th-c. murder trial. Here monologues are multiplied until no fewer than twelve offset (or undercut) one another. In this work, increased objectivity gained through the cancelled relativities of the various characters comes at the expense of
the empathy that is Browning’s greatest strength
Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868) is a verse novel based on a late 17th-c. murder trial. Here monologues are multiplied until no fewer than twelve offset (or undercut) one another. This work has had formal influences on novelists as different as
Virginia Woolf (The Waves) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying)
Who wrote The Angel of the House (1854, 56)
Coventry Patmore (1823-96)
In 1854, 56 Coventry Patmore wrote
The Angel of the House
Dickinson gave the lyric epigram
a compression quite uncharacteristic of the period
Dickinson achieves compression in her lyric epigrams through
extreme ellipsis–incomplete chains of discourse, helped out by a private system of rhetorical punctuation.
Whitmanesque spontaneity and prolixity were to continue in American literature in writers as diverse as
Pound, Kerouac, and Creeley
Romantics and their early Victorian successors distrusted the literary language shaped in the Enlightenment (to rational ends). Instead, they often formulated their trans-rational contents by relying on
expression through multiple attempts–sketches or aggregations of details.
Through the Victorian period the language itself began to alter. It became less concise, less conducive to… (then add a counterpoint)
separation of thought from feeling (though this generated its own new precision of language)
The theory that modernism was a response to a crisis in Victorian literature gets little support from the poetry of
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Hardy’s poetry has not been widely imitated. One exception is
Philip Larkin
