Victorian Poetry (CUCET,CRET,UGC NET NOTES) Important points to rember

The Victorian Age

• Queen Victoria, the last Hanoverian monarch
• Long reign from 1837 to 1901
• Heyday of colonial trade and commerce
• Exploding population
• Society is considered to have been priggish (formal and pretentious), moralistic, and narrow-minded
• Early Victorian literature witnessed the continuing spirit of Romanticism
• Later Victorian literature saw the rise of modernism
Major events during Victoria’s reign
• Rise of Technology and Innovation
• Industrial Revolution
• The Great Exhibition of London
• The Indian Rebellion (1857)
• The Great Irish Famine (1846-52)
• Irish Home Rule
• The Chartist Movement (1838-48)
• The Great Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884)
• The Boer Wars
• The Crimean War
Technology and Innovation
• The blast furnace was the trailblazer in the Industrial Revolution
• The spinning mill revolutionized textiles
• Powerful steam engines became popular
• The introduction of the railways
– Made travel faster
– Made it possible for large quantities of goods to be transported quickly and efficiently over land
Industrial Revolution
• Inaugurated the modern era of mass production and consumption
• Began in England before it reached the other parts of Europe
• Methods of production changed.
• An age of materialism started
• The main aim was to produce large quantities of goods as quickly as possible
• Companies were highly profit-oriented
• Working classes suffered from over-exploitation
• The workers united and formed trade unions
The Great Exhibition of London
• Great Britain was the leader of the industrial revolution and feeling very secure in that ideal.
• To symbolize this industrial, military and economic superiority, the Great Exhibition of London (1851) was held in
Hyde Park in London in the specially constructed Crystal Palace.
• Along with the feats of Britain, the technological achievements pioneered by the British in its colonies and
protectorates, and exhibits from “less civilized” countries were included
The Great Exhibition of London
• The Exhibition was a nationalistic parading the accomplishments of Britain and gave expression to the smug
satisfaction or “Victorianism”
• Millions of visitors who came from European cities
• Among the 13,000 exhibits were the Jacquard loom, an envelope machine, steel-making displays and a reaping
machine from the United States
• The profits from the event allowed for the foundation of public works such as the Albert Hall, the Science Museum,
the National History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Indian Rebellion of 1857
• For the British, it is a mutiny of sepoys of the army of the East India Company
• For the Indians, it is the First War of Independence
• Many British were killed
• Literature based on the Indian rebellion:
– John Masters’ Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), a fictionalised account of the Rebellion by a British Captain
based in Bhowani, a fictionalised version of Jhansi
 – JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the
Rebellion
– Tennyson’s ballad “The Defence of Lucknow” (1879), an account of the heroic resistance by the English
soldiers
Ireland in the Victorian Period
• While the population of England doubled, that of Ireland halved
• Ireland did not partake in the Industrial Revolution
• Ireland also endured a devastating famine from 1845-1847, as the result of a failed potato crop
• Large numbers of the Irish emigrated to Britain, the Americas and Australia
• Irish Catholics blamed the British government
• 'The Irish Question' became a burning issue and home rule campaigns abounded in Ireland, though it did not
materialize
The Chartist Movement (1838-48)
• In 1837, six Members of the Parliament and six working men formed a committee and published the People's
Charter in 1838, which demanded Parliamentary reforms and voting rights.
• This was followed by many working class movements for political reform between 1838 and 1848, which are
together called the Chartist Movements
• Chartism was a continuation of fight in the 18th century against corruption and for democracy in the industrial
society
The Great Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884)
• The three Reform Acts, of 1832, 1867, and 1884, all extended voting rights to previously disfranchised citizens,
leading to controversies
• Women were not allowed to vote until 18 years after Victoria's death
• In works such as Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, authors debated whether this shift of power would create
democracy that would, in turn, destroy high culture
• From the 1840s onwards, several Factory Acts were also passed to provide better working conditions in factories
Two Wars
• The Boer Wars (1880–1881 and 1899–1902)
– The Dutch had established a colony in South Africa, and came to be called Boers.
– The British drove the Dutch settlers out in the Boer Wars, and South Africa was made a British dominion.
• The Crimean War (1853-56)
– Russia lost to France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire
– Fight was over the rights of Christians in the Holy Land, (controlled by the Ottoman Empire), and due to
Britain’s and France’s unwillingness to let Russia gain more power
– The Crimean War, the setting for Tennyson’s 'Charge of the Light Brigade', altered the balance of power in
Europe and set the stage for I World War
Socio-Cultural Background
• England became
– the leading industrial power in Europe
– an empire that occupied more than a quarter of the earth's surface
• A mood of nationalist pride and optimism about future progress
• Expanding, wealthy middle class
• Unregulated industrialization leading to the deterioration of rural England, shoddy urbanization, and massive
poverty concentrated in slums
Socio-Cultural Background
• Impatience with new ideas on the one hand; numerous intellectual activities on the other
• Victorian Dilemma: In religion, literature and philosophy the Victorian period was an age of doubt.
– Conflict between science & religion following the publication of Darwin (1809-82)'s Origin of Species (1859)
– Conflict between the industrial (urban) and the agrarian (rural) ways of life
– Conflict between oligarchy and monarchy
• New socio-political theories
– Herbert Spencer (1820-1903, Social Darwinism)
– JS Mill (1806-73, Utilitarianism)
– Positivism (August Comte)
• The view that all valid knowledge must be based on the methods of empirical investigation
established by the natural sciences
• “The woman question”
– The early feminist agitation for equal status and rights
 – Victorian dress reform or rational dress movement urged women to adopt simplified garments for athletic
activities such as bicycling or swimming
– New Woman fiction
Literary Features
• Two trends
– (1) Insistence on morality, propriety; revolt against the grossness of the earlier age; respect for convention
(Tennyson and Dickens)
– (2) Revolt against convention; conservatism (Carlyle, Arnold, Thackeray, Browning)
– The revolt strengthened with the age: In the Pre-Raphaelites, there is no morality except the author’s
regard for his art
Literary Features
• New ideas propagated in science, religion and politics reflected in literature
• The spirit of scepticism is found in Tennyson's In Memoriam and Idylls of the King, in Arnold’s meditative poetry &
Carlyle
• New religious and ethical thought emerged in Oxford Movement (Cardinal Newman) which reflected widespread
discontent with Church of England
Literary Features
• After the Education Act of 1870, elementary education became compulsory
• This gave rise to an enormous reading public
• At this time, printing and paper became cheap
• These developments led to a greater demand for the novel
• Many writers came under international influences
– American-British writers’ interaction (Carlyle and Transcendentalists, Henry James)
– German influence (Carlyle, Arnold)
– Italian influence (Browning, Swinburne, Morris, Meredith)
Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)
• Born as one of eight children in the gloomy and neurotic household of the local vicar
• Most of Tennyson's early education was under the direction of his father
• Due to family background, certain themes recurred:
– madness, murder, avarice, miserliness
– social climbing, marriages arranged for profit instead of love
– estrangements between families and friends
At Cambridge
• Entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827
– First volume of poetry, Poems by Two Brothers (1827)
– Became member of the club called “Apostles”, which gave him much needed friends and confidence
– Won the Chancellor’s Gold medal for “Timbuctoo”
– Formed a close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam
• Poems, Chiefly Lyrical appeared in 1830
• The next year his father, a past victim of severe physical and mental breakdown, died, and the young Tennyson left
the university without degree
“Timbuctoo” (1829)
• Written when Tennyson was 19
• Won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge
• Reworking of his earlier poem “Armageddon” (a poem written when he was 15, which offers a vision of the distant
human future, in outer space)
• About a legendary city in Africa
• At that time, European colonization of the interior of Africa was beginning
• Optimistic poem showing the “modern” expectation that the human race, guided by reason and science, would
come together and build a better world for everyone
• Tennyson didn’t think this poem was good.
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830)
• “The Kraken”
– Irregular sonnet
– About a massive legendary creature from Icelandic saga that dwells at the bottom of the sea
• “Ode to Memory”
– Picturesque description of landscape, as in later poetry
• “Mariana”
– Based on the character Mariana in Measure for Measure
 – Theme of a woman waiting for her lover's return
– Typical style: brilliant use of objects and landscapes to convey a state of strong emotion
The Young Poet
• Poems (1832-1833) received a savage criticism from John Wilson Croker of The Quarterly Review
• There followed the ‘Ten Years’ Silence’, a period of neurotic refusal to publish, when Tennyson’s life lacked
direction and his emotional instability seemed unusually apparent
• Arthur Hallam fell in love with Tennyson’s sister, Emily
• In 1830, Tennyson and Hallam went to Pyrenees in France-Spain border with a plan to make money.
Poems inspired by life at Pyrenees
• “Oenone”
– Dramatic monologue
– Describes the Greek mythological character Oenone and her witnessing of the events in the life of her
lover, Paris, as he is involved in the events of the Trojan War
• “The Lotos-Eaters”
– Dramatic monologue on Ulysses’ adventures
– Describes Ulysses’ mariners who, upon eating the lotos fruit, are put into a lethargic state and isolated
from the outside world; argue that death is a completion of life
– Biblical overtones; but the message is a reversal: here, the fruit offers a release from the life of labour
Adversities
• Tennyson’s poetry was meeting with very adverse criticism
• John Wilson Croker of the Quarterly Review, who had devastated Keats, accused Tennyson and his poetry of lack of
masculinity and considered him a member of the Cockney School, for imitating Keats.
• Meanwhile, Arthur Hallam died in Vienna of a congenital brain disease in 1833, at the age of 22.
• Poverty, madness, epilepsy in the family
• Family moved to Epping
• Tennyson began his long and interrupted engagement to Emily Sellwood and made a disastrous investment in the
woodcarving scheme of his friend Dr Allen
Greatest Short Poems
• The adversities inspired Tennyson’s greatest poems:
• “Ulysses,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “Tithonus,” “Tiresias,” “Break, break, break” and the many elegies later collected into
In Memoriam (1850)
• Tennyson felt compelled to publish because of pressures over copyright and prodding of friends like Edward
Fitzgerald
• Poems (1842)
– First volume comprised earlier revised poems: The Lady of Shalott, The Lotos-Eaters
– The second contained new poems: Locksley Hall, Ulysses
“The Lady of Shalott”
• An Arthurian story in ballad form, depicting tragic love.
• The story of the Lady of Shalott, separated from the outside world because she is cursed to remain in her tower in
an island beside a river flowing to Camelot, and should not even look out of the window.
• A large mirror within her chamber reflects the outside world, and she weaves a tapestry illustrating its wonders by
means of the mirror's reflection.
• Seeing Sir Lancelot riding down to Camelot, the Lady leaves her loom to look down on him directly from her
window, which immediately fulfills the curse. Her tapestry begins to unravel and the mirror cracks.
• She tries to escape in a boat, and she must die as a result.
“Ulysses”
• Dramatic monologue; companion-piece of “The Lotos-Eaters”
• Ulysses declares that there is little point in his staying home “by this still hearth” with his old wife, doling out
rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses in his kingdom.
• His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes “to follow knowledge like
a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.
• This poem also concerns the poet’s own personal journey, and is an elegy for his deeply cherished friend
• “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” became a motto for the Victorians. For them Ulysses was a model of
individual self-assertion and the Romantic rebellion against bourgeois conformity.
“Morte d’Arthur”
• In 1833, Tennyson proposed to write an epic about King Arthur
• By 1838, he had completed one of the twelve books, entitled “Morte d’Arthur,” which chronicled the king’s death.
• He published this single book in 1842 within the framework of the poem, “The Epic,” which consists of 51 lines that
precede “Morte d’Arthur” and thirty lines that follow it.
 • “The Epic” provides a modern context for the Arthurian story by casting it as a manuscript read aloud by a poet to
three of his friends following their Christmas-Eve revelry.
• After Tennyson completed all twelve books of Idylls of the King in 1869, he discarded this framing poem and
retitled “Morte d’Arthur” as “The Passing of Arthur.”
“Tithonus”
• Dramatic monologue based on Greek mythology.
• Initially conceived as a companion-poem to “Ulysses”
• Tithonus was once a beautiful man who was chosen by Aurora, the goddess of dawn, as her lover.
• She granted him immortality but not youth.
• Tithonus appeals to Aurora to take back the gift of immortality.
• He now realizes the danger in not belonging to the rest of humanity.
• This poem was one of a set of 4 works (including “Morte d’Arthur,” “Ulysses,” and “Tiresias”) that Tennyson wrote
shortly after Arthur Henry Hallam’s death in 1833.
Locksley Hall
• Dramatic Monologue with autobiographical overtones
• The emotions of a weary soldier who comes to his childhood home, the fictional Locksley Hall
• Theme of disappointed love; evils of worldly marriage
• Scorn of industrialized world, but accepts change at the end
The Princess, A Medley (1847)
• Tennyson's first attempt at a long narrative poem
• Serio-comic poem in blank verse
• Theme: education of women and the establishment of female colleges
• Presents a ladies’ academy & a mutinously intellectual princess at the head
• The ‘new’ woman
• Tennyson seems to assert that men and women do not have identical roles in the society
Annus Mirabilis
• 1850 was a great year fro Tennyson
• Published his most enduring work, In Memoriam
• Succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate
• Finally married Emily Sellwood
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
• A group of 132 elegies written over a period of 17 years
• In memory of Arthur Henry Hallam
• Original title: “The Way of the Soul”
• Search for hope after great loss—Victorian theme
• Long series of meditations on life & death
• The poet’s anxieties about change, evolution, immortality
• Epilogue is a marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of Tennyson’s youngest sister, Cecilia
• Iambic tetrameter quatrains rhyming abba called "In Memoriam stanza"
• A famous expression “Nature red in tooth and claw”
More Poems
• In 1853 Tennyson and Emily moved to Farringford on the Isle of Wight, where his privacy was constantly invaded
• Because of his obsessive shyness Tennyson invariably resigned or withdrew from public engagements
• The poetry continued to pour forth
• Maud and Other Poems (1855) included “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington”
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854)
• Describes a disastrous historical military engagement during the initial phase of the Crimean War fought between
Turkey and Russia (1854-56)
• The story of a brigade consisting of 600 soldiers who rode on horseback into the “valley of death”
Maud (1855)
• Narrator falls in love with Maud
• Brother forbids alliance
• Meets her secretly in the garden (“Come into the garden, Maud”)
• Kills brother, flees to France
• Maud also dies
• Poet becomes mad and imagines himself dead
• Regains sanity and leaves to fight in Crimean War
Imperialist verse
 • “The Defence of Lucknow”
– Describes the British defence of the Residency that was attacked during the Siege of Lucknow by Indian
“mutineers” in 1857 (during the First War of Independence)
• “Havelock—November 25th, 1857”
– Another response to the 1857 “Mutiny” in India
– Response to the death of Henry Havelock, one of the British heroes of the defence of Lucknow
Arthurian Poems and Popularity
• In 1859 began The Idylls of the King
• In 1864 he published Enoch Arden in a volume which also included Tithonus
• Tennyson was extraordinarily popular by this time
• He refused a baronetcy four times, though he did eventually agree to a title and took his seat in the Lords in 1833
• Received honorary doctorates from various universities
• Also in the 1860s the Tennysons built another home, in Aldworth near Haslemere, and he developed an interest in
the Metaphysical Society
• At the end of the decade he published The Holy Grail and Other Poems (1869, dated 1870)
Idylls of the King (1859)
• The 1859 edition contained only four ("Enid," "Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinevere") of the eventual twelve idylls
• Cycle of twelve narrative poems in blank verse
• Last of these "Morte d'Arthur"
• Tales of King Arthur and the Round Table
• From Arthur’s coming to power to his death at the hands of Mordred, the traitor
• Arthur’s attempt and failure to lift up mankind and create a perfect kingdom
• Allegory of the societal conflicts in Britain
• Dedication to recently deceased Prince Albert
Poetic Drama and Last Poems
• Wrote poetic drama in later years
• In 1875 Tennyson published his first play, Queen Mary
• A group of dramatic works followed, including Harold (1876), Becket (1884) and The Cup (1881), which were not
great successes
• Prose play The Promise of May (only prose work; shows Tennyson’s growing despondency and resentment at the
religious, moral, and political tendencies of the age)
• Later poems—muse occasionally nodding; sharper tone; discontent with the artifices of his time
• Perhaps no poet’s reputation has received – and withstood – so severe a criticism since his death
Tennyson’s Image and Influence
• Embodiment of his age
• Poet Laureate and official poetic spokesman for the reign of Victoria
• Victoria considered him the perfect poet of “love and loss”
• Inspired the Pre-Raphaelites
• TS Eliot called him the “poet of metric and melancholia”
Tennyson’s Style
• Subject of Tennyson's Poetry
– Earlier poems lyric and legendary narrative
– Later poems are of ethical interest
– Tennyson was no deep thinker; was content to mirror the feelings / aspirations of the time
• Tennyson's Craft
– Took great care and skill in perfecting the form & technique
– Mixed sound and sense (great musical quality)
• Keatsian descriptive power. Ornate description, pictorial effect, sumptuous imagery (created a lovely image by
carefully amassing detail)
Robert Browning (1812-89)
• The son of a scholarly father, Browning was largely educated at home, and read widely
• At 16 he began to study at the newly established London University, but returned home after a brief period
• He wrote verse from an early age, taking as his literary hero Shelley, who influenced much of his work and
prompted him to adopt vegetarian & atheist principles for a time
• In 1833 he published Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession
Early Works
• Browning then turned to the dramatic monologue, which characterizes his best work
• His next poem, Paracelsus (1835), deals with the life of a Swiss alchemist, a subject suggested by the poet’s friend
Amédée de Ripert-Monclar
 • In 1837 Browning wrote a play, Strafford, for the actor William Macready
• In spite of the efforts of Macready & John Forster, who assisted in revising the work for the stage, it was not a
popular success
• After a visit to Italy (1838) he published Sordello (1840),which concentrated on “the incidents in the development
of a soul” as evinced in the life of a poet who was Dante’s contemporary
Pauline (1833)
• Subtitled “A Fragment of a Confession”
• Published anonymously
• Introspective long poem
• Influence of (and homage to) Shelley
• It was briefly noticed in a few journals
• John Stuart Mill famously remarked that he found in Pauline “a more intense & morbid self-consciousness than I
ever knew in any sane human being”
Paracelsus (1835)
• Story of a 16th century alchemist
• Monodrama* without action (*a theatrical or operatic piece played by a single actor or singer, usually portraying
one character)
• Hero’s unquenchable thirst for that breadth of knowledge which is beyond the grasp of one man
• Browning’s predominant ideas: life without love a failure; God’s will, more than human conjecture, is behind
everything
Sordello
• Long poem in heroic couplets
• The imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard introduced in Dante’s Divine Comedy
• Relationship between art and life
• Obscure style which led to hostile reception
Dramatic Poetry
• From 1841 to 1846 Browning’s work was published in a series bearing the general title of Bells and Pomegranates
• These included Pippa Passes (1841), Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), and some plays
• Browning’s best known poems date from this early period:
– “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola”
– “My Last Duchess,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”
– “The Pied Piper of the Hamelin”
– “How They Brought The Good News From Ghent to Aix”
– “Home Thoughts from Abroad”
– “The Bishop Orders His Tomb in St Praxed’s Church”
– “The Flight of the Duchess”
Pippa Passes
• Verse drama
• The first in a series of dramatic pieces
• About a woman who works as a silkwinder
• Concluding lines: “God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world!”
• Controversial for its frank portrayal of disreputable characters, and for sexual frankness
Marriage
• Browning paid a visit to Italy in 1844, returning to take part in the admiration of Elizabeth Barrett’s poems that year
• Elizabeth was six years his elder, a semi-invalid in her domineering father’s house in Wimpole Street
• He corresponded with her; met her; admired her poems
• Secretly married her and eloped to Italy
• The Brownings settled in Florence where their son was born
• They lived there until Elizabeth’s death in 1861.
Browning’s Characters
• “Fra Lippo Lippi” (15th century Florentine painter and monk being interrogated by some Medici watchmen, who
have caught him out at night)
• “Andrea del Sarto” (Renaissance painter in Florence talking to his nagging wife Lucrezia)
• “Caliban Upon Setebos” (Shakespeare's Caliban talks about the world and his god Setebos)
• “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (Jewish mathematician and scholar; theme of old age)
– Begins: “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be...”
Browning’s Characters
• “Abt Vogler” (18th-19th century German music composer)
• “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” (a Renaissance bishop in his deathbed)
 • “My Last Duchess” (recently widowed Duke of Ferrara)
• “The Grammarian’s Funeral” (The speaker is a disciple of an accomplished grammarian who has recently died)
• “Home Thoughts, From Abroad” (A homesick traveller longs for every detail of his beloved home)
• “Porphyria’s Lover” (speaker strangles his beautiful lover to preserve the moment of love)
The Ring and the Book
• In Florence Browning had discovered in a stall an ‘old yellow book’ of documents relating to a 17 th century murder
trial & he now began to contemplate his ‘Roman Murder-Story’
• The ‘murder story’, The Ring and the Book, was published in monthly instalments in 1868-1869
• The poem received complimentary reviews & Browning, ‘king of the mystics’, was at last popular with the reading
public
• The discursive story of the murder of a young wife Pompilia by her worthless husband, told by nine different
people
Last Works
• His vitality continued undiminished as he produced a remarkable series of later works, too frequently undervalued,
ending with Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889)
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
• Browning’s prolific output during these years nevertheless left him time to produce a translation of Aeschylus’
Agamemnon (1877), to watch anxiously over the career of his painter son, and to led a demanding social life.
Death
• The foundation of the Browning Society (1881) is an indication of the status he had achieved as sage and celebrity
in old age
• He died while visiting his son in Venice and, his wish to be buried in Florence providing impossible to fulfill, his body
was returned to England & buried in Westminster Abbey
Browning’s Style
• Obscurity; sometimes rugged, angular style
• At its best, noble dignity & verbal music
• Variety of metrical forms
• Cleverly manipulated rhythmic effects
• Didn’t care for beauty of description for its own sake; beauty of expression often captured in a single image
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)
• The eldest of the 12 children of Edward Moulton Barrett & his wife Mary
• Spent most of her childhood & youth at the estate of Hope End, near Malvern
• A precocious & ardent student, Elizabeth Barrett studied with a governess & shared her brothers’ lessons in Latin &
Greek
• At the age of 15 she suffered a serious illness
• She began to write verse at an early age
Marriage
• Nevertheless, she embarked on a productive period, writing poems and essays for The Athenaeum
• Poems (1844), which included “A Drama of Exile” & “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” received considerable acclaim
• One of her admirers was Robert Browning, whose verse she had complimented in “Lady Geraldine”
• A correspondence soon developed, growing rapidly into love
• In order to avoid her father’s expected prohibition, the poets were married secretly in September 1846 and left for
Italy a week later
• They settled at Casa Guidi in Florence, where their son Robert was born
• In 1850 she published a further volume of Poems among them the Sonnets from the Portuguese, written during her
courtship
• This was followed by Casa Guidi Windows (1851)
• On the death of Wordsworth in 1850, The Athenaeum had proposed Elizabeth Barrett Browning as an appropriate
successor to the post of Poet Laureate, but it was not until the publication of Aurora Leigh (1856) that her
recognition as the foremost woman poet in English was secure
• Poems before Congress (1860), which supported the cause of Italian unification, was branded as hysterical &
unwomanly
• Saddened by the death of her sister Henrietta & the Italian leader, Cavour, she fell ill and died at Casa Guidi
• Robert Browning prepared her Last Poems (1861)for posthumous publication
Sonnets from the Portuguese (pub 1850)
 • Collection of 44 love sonnets
• Written during the period leading to marriage with Robert Browning in 1846
• Elizabeth did not want to publish them for being too personal
• Urged by Robert Browning to publish
• Appeared as translations of foreign sonnets
• Elizabeth admired Portuguese poet Luís de Camões
• Browning called her by the pet-name "my little Portuguese"
• One famous sonnet: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
Aurora Leigh
• Longest and most innovative work
• Epic verse novel in blank verse
• Depicts a woman-poet-hero whose country’s destiny depends on the balance of her deeds
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
• For a detailed biography of Matthew Arnold, please see the chapter "Victorian Fiction and Prose"
• Son of the famous headmaster of Rugby School, Thomas Arnold for whom he wrote the poem “Rugby Chapel”
• Legitimate fame is as a prose writer and critic
• Arnold's poems are not numerous, and not of high quality
• Classical themes in meditative & melancholy mood (this is a modernist strain)
• Themes of alienation, stoicism, despair, spiritual emptiness
• Apostle of sanity & culture
Poetic Career
• Arnold’s poetic career began in 1849 with the publication of The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, by A (1849)
• Poetic career was over but by New Poems (1867)
• Major works:
– Empedocles On Etna and Other Poems (1852)
– Poems (1853)
– Poems Second Series (1855) and
– Merope (1858, a classical tragedy)
Arnold: Poetry
• Lyrics
– “Marguerite poems”, “The Forsaken Merman”, “Dover Beach”, “Scholar Gipsy”, “Philomela”
• Poetic dramas
– Empedocles on Etna, Merope
• Narrative poems
– “Tristram & Iseult”, “Sohrab & Rustum”
• Elegies
– “Thyrsis”, “Scholar Gipsy”, Memorial Verses
“Dover Beach”
• The speaker is on the beach, watching the calm sea and the full tide
• The moon's bright light shines 0n the French Coast across the English Channel and disappears, while the cliffs of
England glimmer.
• The speaker calls his companion to the window to enjoy the sweet night air. He invites her to listen to the grating
of the pebbles as they are flung back and forth by the waves, bringing "the eternal note of sadness in"
• The poet remarks that Sophocles had heard this ebb and flow of human misery, which they are hearing now.
“Dover Beach”
• The Sea of Faith was was full, and lay around the earth like a girdle
• Yet now, the speaker hears only the melancholy roar of the sea of faith
• The poet tells his beloved that they should be honest with each other, for the world that they live in, which looks
so beautiful and new, and lay before them like a land of dreams, does not have joy, love or spiritual light, or
certainty or peace or help in times of trouble.
• And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
“Thyrsis”
• Pastoral elegy to commemorate the death of Arnold's friend and poet Arthur Hugh Clough in 1861
• Clough is presented as Thyrsis, and Arnold as Corydon
• Thyrsis is a character from Virgil Eclogues who lost a singing match with Corydon
• Famous are the lines in which Arnold recalls the Oxford countryside the two of them explored as students in the
1840s
“The Scholar Gipsy”
• A pastoral elegy based on a 17th century story found in Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing
• Companion-poem of "Thyrsis"
• An impoverished Oxford student was dejected by the fret and fever of modernity, and left his studies to join a band
of gipsies, who had traditional learning and original imagination
• Rumours are that the scholar gipsy is not subject to ageing and death, and was again seen from time to time
around Oxford
• Arnold ends with an epic simile of a Tyrian merchant seaman who flees from Greek competitors to seek a new
lifein Iberia.
“Empedocles on Etna”
• Dramatic poem by Matthew Arnold, published anonymously in 1852 in the collection Empedocles on Etna, and
Other Poems.
• In Poems 1853, he excluded this long poem, and explained in the Preface that the mood of elegiac gloom and
helpless suffering which "finds no vent in action" in the poem were too depressing
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61)
• Poems charged with the deep-seated despair & despondency of Arnold’s works
• Typical example of the Victorian intellectual seeking in vain for moral and metaphysical certainties
• Most original work: The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), a "Long Vacation Pastoral" on Oxford set in the Scottish
Highands
American Contemporaries
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
• Walt Whitman (1819-92)
• Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• Formed in 1848 by painter poets D. G. Rossetti (1828-82), W. H. Hunt (1827-1910) & John Millais (1829-96)
• Influence of John Ruskin
• Revolt against 18th century academism and the canons of the Royal Academy; against realism
• Dedicated to recovering the purity of medieval art which Raphael and the Renaissance had destroyed
• Attempt to return to the truthfulness, simplicity, accuracy & spirit of devotion of Italian painting before Raphael &
Italian Renaissance
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• In painting it is distinguished by its love of bright colour, vividly naturalistic detail and subjects drawn from religion
or literature (Dante, Shakespeare, Keats & Arthurian Literature)
• In poetry, Pre-Raphaelitism found congenial precedents in Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the work of
Tennyson
• The movement was as short-lived as its periodical The Germ
The Fleshly School of Poetry
• In a review-essay titled "The Fleshly School of Poetry", Scottish author Robert Buchanan castigated the PRB
(Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne) for its detailed description of scenes and frank treatment of sexuality
• Rossetti replied with “The Stealthy School of Criticism” in The Athenaeum, December 1871
• Swinburne replied with a pamphlet, Under the Microscope, in 1872.
DG Rossetti
• Poet, painter and translator
• Father was an Italian patriot exiled from Naples and mother was daughter of Byron’s physician, Dr John Polidori
• Thus Rossetti’s background and heritage were essentially Italian
• Studied painting
The PRB
• Met William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and these friendships led in the autumn of 1848 to the
formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)
• Rossetti worked with unusual consistency in the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s both as painter and poet and
attempted to revolutionized Victorian art
• His paintings were highly symbolic, spiritually charged and suggestive of other, remote, worlds
• Rossetti’s poetry, like his painting, was detailed, symbolic, concerned with the remote and sometimes erotic; it was
often pseudo-medieval cast in ballad form and sometimes archaic in language
Major Works
 • His major poems included Jenny, a dramatic monologue about a London prostitute, his best-known poem The
Blessed Damozel, as well as early studies of “Dante at Verona”, “The Bride’s Prelude” and “Sister Helen”
• In the 1850s Rossetti made drawings for Poems by Alfred Tennyson (1857) in which Millais and Holman Hunt also
participated
• He also undertook some mural decorations at Oxford
The Blessed Damozel
• Written when DGR was 18 years old
• The poem describes the damozel observing her lover from heaven, and her unfulfilled yearning for their reunion in
heaven.
• Partly inspired by Poe's "The Raven"
• Medievalism
• Pictorial realism and symbolic overtones
• Union of flesh and spirit
• Sensuousness and religiousness
The Blessed Damozel: Summary
• The Damozel in heaven overlooks earth and thinks of her lover.
• To the Damozel Time seemed to last forever because she was without her love.
• Then the lover on earth talks about his beloved.
• The next few stanzas describe heaven, and other lovers reunite around her as she sits and watches alone.
• In stanzas ten and eleven, her lover can hear her and feel her, and describes the sound of her voice like a bird's
song
• As she waits at the gates of heaven, she dreams of the day that they ("we two") will be together and present
themselves in the beauty and glory of God.
The Blessed Damozel: Summary
• The Damozel wants her love to be ideal and perfect, but it is not possible, now. The two worlds separating them
doesn't keep them apart in thought, but it is not possible to be together. However, she wishes that their love be as
it was on earth with the approval of Christ the Lord.
• The Damozel finally realizes that she can have nothing until the time comes. The Damozel suddenly becomes
peaceful and lets the light take her. She will enter heaven without her love. Her lover on earth also knows this.
• Physically apart, but together at heart, there is nothing that can be done but hope and pray. Therefore the
Damozel "laid her face between her hands, And wept."
The Oxford Murals
• Commissioned by John Ruskin
• Arthurian themes
• Done for the Oxford Union with several of his PRB friends
• As the walls were unprepared with plastering or underpainting, the murals soon deteriorated and later restoration
did little to evoke the originals
Two Stunners
• In Oxford he met Jane Burden for whom he developed an obsessive love, and who was later unhappily married to
William Morris but continued to play an important role in Rossetti’s private life
• She was one of the many ‘stunners’, to use the PRB term, whom the poets and painters made their subject:
beautiful women with red-gold hair, attenuated fingers, faintly, sulky mouths and swan-like necks
• Another stunner was Elizabeth Siddal, whom Rossetti had met and fallen in love with in 1850
• They were unable to marry until 1860, and Lizzie died from an overdose of laudanum in 1862
Morbid Years
• Although Rossetti had not been a faithful husband or lover, Lizzie's loss affected him deeply and an increasing
morbidity became apparent in his work
• However, he published The Early Italian Poets (1861; revised as Dante and His Circle, 1874), translations from some
60 writers which demonstrate another side of his gifts
• In the 1860s, too, Rossetti’s painting yielded to decorative art – he produced designs in stained glass, furniture, and
tiles for William Morris’s firm and then, as eye strain developed, he turned increasingly to poetry
• Poems (1870) drew on the manuscripts he had first, in a fit of remorse, interred with Lizzie Siddal but later
exhumed
Last Years
• Shortly thereafter he was attacked by Robert Buchanan in a scurrilous pamphlet, “The Fleshly School of Poetry”
(1872),to which he replied with “The Stealthy School of Criticism”
• By now increasing illness, morbidity and paranoia beset him, and in 1872 he attempted suicide
• Yet he published Ballads and Sonnets (1881), which included a sonnet sequence, The House of Life
 • Chloral, imagined treacheries and groundless suspicions took their toll and, a near recluse, he died shortly before
his 54thbirthday
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
• Alcoholic and highly excitable character
• Cared for by his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton
• Swinburne followed the poetic style of Rossetti but was not as successful
• When his work Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866, he was much blamed for moral reasons.
• Because of theelements of homosexuality and bestiality in his works, he is classified as a decadent poet
• Tristram of Lyonesse is usually considered to be his best work. It tells the undying story of Tristram and Iseult.
• Atalanta in Calydon is a closet drama.
William Morris (1834-1896)
• Textile designer, architectural designer, poet, novelist, essayist and painter, translator from Icelandic
• Major Poetry
– The Defence of Guenevere
– The Life and Death of Jason
– The Earthly Paradise
• Major Fiction ("prose romances" set in a fantasy world)
– News from Nowhere (1890, utopian socialism and science fiction)
– The Wood Beyond the World
– The Well at the World’s End
Other members
• Christina Rossetti (1830-94)
• William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919, brother of DG Rossetti and Christina Rossetti)
• FG Stephens
• James Collinson
• Thomas Woolner
• Coventry Patmore
Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883)
• One of the greatest translators of the time
• He translated six of Calderon’s plays, Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar
Khayyam.
• At first the Rubaiyat attracted no attention.
• When Rossetti discovered the Rubaiyat in 1861, it slowly became famous
• In 1868, a new revised edition appeared
• The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. (famous lines)
The Rubaiyats
• Romantic melancholy (anticipating Arnold)
• Epicurean elements (anticipating fin-de-siecle poets)
• Rebelled against certain Victorian values
– Frank sexuality
– Pessimism about the human condition (at the time the translation appeared, the Victorians were
wallowing in a sense of superiority and optimism following the Great Exhibition)
• Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" seems to be a reply
– Rabbi sees life as “perfect” and thanks God that he is a “man”