Victorian Poetry

Question 1

Name two poets whose work overlapped the division between the Romantic and Victorian periods

Answer 1

John Clare (1793-1864) and Savage Landor (1775-1864)

Question 2

Victorian poets can be regarded as returning to their cultural inheritance in order to

Answer 2

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.)

Question 3

Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. displays his temperamental passivity–his

Answer 3

endurance of helplessness

Question 4

In Memoriam A.H.H. is both a religious poem and a

Answer 4

poem of doubt (its strength lies in being both)

Question 5

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.

Answer 5

pre-Raphaelite; Middle Ages

Question 6

What poet marks the landmark–and quarry–of lyricism (lyricism could go no further.

Answer 6

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

Question 7

Robert Browning did more than any Victorian poet to

Answer 7

modernize poetry

Question 8

Browning (1812-89) was to mark a point of departure for the modernist movement. He perpetually

Answer 8

experimented and innovated

Question 9

Browning is said to have had “a taste for…

Answer 9

“ugly reality” (Walter Bagehot)

Question 10

Browning invented a type of poem (later popular with the Georgians) which has a simple direct surface meaning, but also contains

Answer 10

digressions or apparently gratuitous elements, tangentially related to the rest.

Question 11

Antecedents to the Browningesque monologue include Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (1824-9) and also

Answer 11

Donne’s Satires (Browning was unusual for his time in admiring Donne.

Question 12

Browning’s dramatic monologues had a prodigious influence, and may be suspected in in

Answer 12

the Jamesian novel

Question 13

By concealing the poet within deliberately ambiguous situations, Browning’s poems force

Answer 13

the reader to respond on his own–poetry that made way for Henry James and modernist fiction

Question 14

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

Answer 14

the empathy that is Browning’s greatest strength

Question 15

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

Answer 15

Virginia Woolf (The Waves) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying)

Question 16

Who wrote The Angel of the House (1854, 56)

Answer 16

Coventry Patmore (1823-96)

Question 17

In 1854, 56 Coventry Patmore wrote

Answer 17

The Angel of the House

Question 18

Dickinson gave the lyric epigram

Answer 18

a compression quite uncharacteristic of the period

Question 19

Dickinson achieves compression in her lyric epigrams through

Answer 19

extreme ellipsis–incomplete chains of discourse, helped out by a private system of rhetorical punctuation.

Question 20

Whitmanesque spontaneity and prolixity were to continue in American literature in writers as diverse as

Answer 20

Pound, Kerouac, and Creeley

Question 21

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

Answer 21

expression through multiple attempts–sketches or aggregations of details.

Question 22

Through the Victorian period the language itself began to alter. It became less concise, less conducive to… (then add a counterpoint)

Answer 22

separation of thought from feeling (though this generated its own new precision of language)

Question 23

The theory that modernism was a response to a crisis in Victorian literature gets little support from the poetry of

Answer 23

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Question 24

Hardy’s poetry has not been widely imitated. One exception is

Answer 24

Philip Larkin