Victorian Poetry Flashcards
Victorian Age
Incl. historical info to Victorian Age
Victorina Age affected by two conflicting sentiments/ideologies:
Progress and Nostalgia
- Utility the catchword of the age (from late 18th c. on) Jeremy Bentham:
– promote facility/happiness through rational demeans
– Sense that happiness can be produced quantitatively , best society by greatest amount of happiness - age of industrialization!
– those that don’t agree (“sound and not sense”)
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Queen Victoria
- born: 1819
- reign: 1837-1901
Great Reform Act/Representation of the People Act
- 1832
introduced wide-ranging changes to the electoral system of England and Wales
Potato blight in Ireland
- 1845
The Great Exhibition
- 1851
- -> ‘progress and nostalgia’
Albert’s death
- 1861
Literary advances in Victorian Age? (not only poetry)
- novel became more popular
- form of dramatic monologue was new
Victorian Era and Shakespeare?
Sonnets?
-> but focused more on Petrarch and other Italian art
.
Pre-Raphaelites return back to Renaissance..?
.
Which forms of Poetry were predominant in Victorian Era?
- poets were very experimental then, mixing forms, etc.
- dramatic monologue
- long narrative poems
Why is Victorian poetry relevant for today?
In school?
.
What is Aurora Leigh about?
Why is it relevant?
(Published 1856)
- an epic novel/poem
- first person narration, from the point of view of Aurora
- its other heroine, Marian Erle, is an abused self-taught child of itinerant parents
- set in Florence, Malvern, London and Paris
- as far as Book 5, Aurora narrates her past, from her childhood to the age of about 27; in Books 6–9, the narrative has caught up with her, and she reports events in diary form.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning styled the poem “a novel in verse”, and referred to it as “the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.”
Scholar Deirdre David asserts that Barrett Browning’s work in Aurora Leigh has made her into “a major figure in any consideration of the nineteenth-century woman writer and of Victorian poetry in general.”[1] John Ruskin called it the greatest long poem of the nineteenth century.[2]
What are the Sonnets from the Portugese about?
Why do they fit in with Victorian Poetry?
- by EBB (in 1850s)
- collection of 44 love sonnets
- was initially hesitant to publish the poems, believing they were too personal. However, her husband Robert Browning insisted they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare’s time and urged her to publish them.
To offer the couple some privacy, she decided to publish them as if they were translations of foreign sonnets.
Christina (Georgina) Rosetti
(1830 – 1894; 64 y/o)
Literary movement: Pre-Raphaelite
- an English poet who wrote various romantic, devotional, and children’s poems
- “Goblin Market” and “Remember” remain famous
Goblin Market published in 1862
Monna Innominata published in 1881
Dante Gabriel Rosetti
(1828 – 1882; 54 y/o)
an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator
Co-founder of Preraphaelite Brotherhood in 1848
- they stood for revolution in art, bold realism, new techniques, breaking with conform composition, new subject matters, also interested in portrayal of women in society
- later while others focused and improved their form of almost photographic realism
- Rosetti was more interested in medievalism
His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Art:
Rossetti’s art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism.
Poetry:
His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.
Rossetti’s personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal (whom he married), Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.
Elizabeth Barret Browning, biographic info
(1806 – 1861 in Florence; 55 y/o)
married Robert Browing in 1846
[2 years before Pre-Rapfaelite Br. founded]
- an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime.
- Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children,
- Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven. Her mother’s collection of her poems forms one of the largest extant collections of juvenilia by any English writer.
- At 15 she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life. Later in life she also developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for the pain from an early age, which is likely to have contributed to her frail health.
- In the 1840s Elizabeth was introduced to literary society through her cousin, John Kenyon. Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838 and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose.
- Politics:
She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth.
Elizabeth’s volume Poems (1844) brought her great success, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning. - Their correspondence, courtship and marriage were carried out in secret, for fear of her father’s disapproval. Following the wedding she was indeed disinherited by her father.
- The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life.
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Elizabeth’s work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is remembered for such poems as “How Do I Love Thee?” (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856).
_____
Sonnets from the Portuguese was published in 1850.
There is debate about the origin of the title. Some say it refers to the series of sonnets of the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões. However, “my little Portuguese” was a pet name that Browning had adopted for Elizabeth and this may have some connection.
The verse-novel Aurora Leigh, her most ambitious and perhaps the most popular of her longer poems, appeared in 1856.
- It is the story of a female writer making her way in life, balancing work and love, and based on Elizabeth’s own experiences.
“Mrs. Browning’s poems are, in all respects, the utterance of a woman — of a woman of great learning, rich experience, and powerful genius, uniting to her woman’s nature the strength which is sometimes thought peculiar to a man.”
Robert Browning
(1812 – 1889; 76 y/o)
married EBB in 1846
[2 years before Pre-Rapfaelite Br. founded]
an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.
His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.
Pre-Raphaelites
Artistic Movement
Founded in 1848
[Karl Marx as contemporary, political uprises]
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by
William Holman Hunt,
John Everett Millais,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
William Michael Rossetti,
James Collinson,
Frederic George Stephens and
Thomas Woolner
who formed a 7-member “Brotherhood” modelled in part on the Nazarene movement.
The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time.
- The group sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art.
- They rejected what they regarded as the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo.
- The Brotherhood believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name “Pre-Raphaelite”. [which doesn’t me pre Raphael, but prior those that supposedly followed Raphael].
- Raphael ( 1483 – 1520) was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Works:
- Early works: bold new form of realism, especially portrayal of sacred subjects
- which almost seemed blasphemous
- today often associated with later work, luscious women with long hair
- decade before french impressionists, captured subjects from urban life
- they thought English Art had become predictable and boring..composition to always be pyramides and such; the highest light always to be on the principle figure; one corner of the picture always in the shade; idealised subjects
- almost photographic style of detail
- also sumptuous/elaborate medieval detail became a hallmark for the Pre-Raphaelites
What have they achieved in art?
- new form of realism
- rules of composition
- new painting technique
- new subject matters
Dante’s interests were diverging from his fellow ‘brothers’
- while they pursued realism, he turned his interest back to early topics of medievalism
Rosetti’s “The Blessed Damozel”
Rossetti’s poem, “The Blessed Damozel”, was an imitation of Keats, and he believed Hunt (having painted The Eve of St. Agnes by Keats) might share his artistic and literary ideals.
What is it about?
- woman in heaven separated from her lover on earth, longing for him to come join her
- it has a romantic yet depressing tone
Form:
- Ballad alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines
- 24 stanzas
- constant rhyme scheme is ABCBDB
- archaic language use
- first two stanzas function as a still-life within the framework of the poem
- technically 3 speakers: the damozel, her lover and first speaker: omniscient (and sympathetic) narrator
- The climax of the poem occurs in Stanza XII (damozel begins to speak for the first time)
- The most interesting use of punctuation is to separate the lover’s words from the rest of the poem.
How Pre-Raphaelic?
- beautiful language
- poetic
- wrote as well as created visual art
- women depicted in Pre-Raphaelite art “are either pausing on the threshold of life—but denied pleasure, or on the threshold of sexual awakening, or even denied justice by the classical gods.”
- In this way, the damozel from “The Blessed Damozel” is a typical example of the other women found in Pre-Raphaelite poetry: trapped, melancholy, and unable to escape a seemingly perfect situation.
- The Pre-Raphaelites believed that art can be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth.
- In the Italian tradition, a woman who is absent from the male speaker, either by distance or by death, is praised with the same intensity and language as would be used to describe deities and saints.”
Comment on the element of performance in the dramatic monologue, the ways these poems enact or express aspects of their speakers, and the ways in which these varied monologues are “dramatic.”
. I
Christina Rossettis
‘Monna Innominata’
What is it about?
Form (and its function)
How can it be interpreted?
- different approaches
