Victorian poetry
up until C20: Romantic poets were more valued than Victorian poetry
now both are part of the literary canon, show different values
morals are especially important for Victorian poets
major themes: love, faith, art
BUT: Tennyson: more emphasis on landscape and nature
Browning: major interest in human character
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
initially was atheist, then became sceptical (mother was very religious)
main genre: dramatic monologue - a poem in the form of a speech or narrative by an
imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while
describing a particular situation or series of events
indirect meanings
not confessional poetry
volume: The Ring and the Book, includes 12 dramatic monologues
plurality of points of view
elliptical structure, gaps in the story
like a soliloquy in a play (monologue – actor talking to audience, sol. – thinking out loud)
more like a realist novel than a symbolist poem
went to Florence with wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (secret letters and marriage, her
father disapproved, she was a poet, too, wrote beautiful sonnets about their love, e.g. “How
Do I Love Thee”)
“My Last Duchess”
setting: Italy, High Renaissance period
speaker: unscrupulous man, possess and destroy wife’s identity
understatement, reader has to reconstruct story from speaker’s narrative
snobbery, her dead substitute: work of art
revenge, power position, possessive pronouns (“my”)
genealogy, commodity, egotism
female gaze: “her looks went everywhere” – her look is forbidden, husband enjoys looking at
her and art, too
1
on Brownign and the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9h_csKEwxg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGaiqdx1y0c
also, watch the BBC series on the Pre-Raphaelite painters I’ve uploaded (Desperate
Romantics)
Study questions:
1. Can you identify the line where the speaker indirectly confesses to have assassinated his
wife?
2. Who is his narrate – to whom is he speaking?
Alfred Tennyson (1819-0892)
1850: poet laureate
when died, Queen Victoria said in 1892: “a great national loss”
buried in Westminster Abbey, the Poets’ Corner
Poe and Wordsworth praised him
Benjamin Disraeli (Victorian Prime Minister): “a great poet, if not a real one”
Ezra Pound’s satirical penname: Alfred Venison
Joyce: Alfred Lawn Tennyson, the “gentleman poet”
Matthew Arnold: “with all his temperament and artistic skill, is deficient in intellectual
power”
a bit preachy, overpolished
sociohistorical commentary & visionary poetry
success lies in negotiating conflicting Victorian discourses:
o historicist – transcendentalist
o populist – elitist
o nationalist – imperialist
o positivist – spiritualist
o feminist – antifeminist
setting: distant past or future
never contemporary England: urbanization, industrialization
uses medievalist discourse in service of Conservative values
relying on Arthurian legends: he is like Prince Albert, a role model
chivalry, courtly love, Gothicism
patriarchal ideals: nobleness, gallantry, honour, manliness
2
vocabulary, genres, iconography: evoke medieval period
“The Lady of Shalott” (1833)
Arthurian setting
← Sir Thomas Malory, C15: Morte d’Arthur
← Italian novella: La Damigella di Scalot, but no mirror, no island in that story
genre: medieval romance, ballad, allegory
a beautiful musical version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80-kp6RDl94
the poem and the paintings it inspired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8usTwS2tw3Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntokfw2OOdQ
epistemological allegory
mind trying to free itself from web of fantasy
moved by desire
accepting destiny (death)
reflections: river, mirror
optical repetition: light – water – mirror
cognitive deception
ontological allegory
female passivity, “The Angel in the House”
vicarious living
mythology: women and webs/thread/yarn/spinning/sewing/weaving:
Arachne (Pallas Athena, weaving contest, goddess loses, punishment: turning her into spider)
Ariadne (Theseus, maze, thread, Minotaur - monster)
Penelope (weaving by day, destroying it by night to gain time, waiting for Odysseus’ return)
Philomena (pictogram story of rape, tongue cut out)
Freud: “On Femininity”, castration complex – women weave all the time to cover up the
shame of not having a penis
Jung: anima, animus – female and male elements of personality, the male element stands for
individuation, the female for family, self-sacrifice
postmodern philosophy: language speaks us, “prisonhouse of language”, we cannot control it
Plato’s cave: we can never live “the reality” of the ideals
3
Lancelot’s shield: a microcosm
window: temporal associations – vantage point of present
aesthetic allegory
symbol of poetic experience
allegory of artist
pure poetry?
Lat. texere – to weave
parable of art: representation postpones death
mimesis, simulacrum: art imitates reality, there is no original of what it represents
mise en abyme: the whole in a detail
Study questions:
1. Find mythological stories about women and weaving, sewing, etc. – any parallels?
2. Interpret the story as a love poem.
