Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry inherited the Romantic contradiction between heart and head. Reason on one hand and feeling, fancy, imagination on the other.
Romanticism had, as a general rule, found a compromise between the two different levels of experience. The romantic poet, sooner or later, had abandoned the struggle to seek refuge in the self-sufficient world of poetry, removed from history, time, reality and necessity.
The Victorian poet revived the struggle, trying to reach a compromise denied from the heroic face of Romanticism. The new age, an age of facts, demanded an immediate social function of poetry and implicitly required the social involvement of the poet, a statement of his social usefulness.
"Poetry as a criticism of life", to put it with Matthew Arnold's words, was the new ground of poetry. It is, therefore, easy to understand how the idea of poetry, that a poet like Tennyson had inherited from such extreme results of Romanticism as J. Keats' Odes("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), had become by this time incompatible than it had been during the early decades of the century.
Romantic poetry is both the assertion of its own impossibility of copying with the world and the contemplation of its inadequacy to change the world.
For the Victorians as for the Romantics, imagination, inspiration, poetry were organs of Truth and Truth in themselves; the poet, then, should go to the market place and teach his Truth.
The Romantics, however, denied the possibility not only of teaching, but even of communicating with large masses, who could not understand the high message of poetry.
So all the "base company"(Shelley ), that is the broadest part of society, was simply cut off from the poetic message and poetic Truth. If we consider the revolutionary and radical ideas of Romanticism, this is, of course, its main contradiction.
With the Victorians, instead, the missionary impulse, and the feeling that poetry should be part of the general progress of society made extreme Romantic refuge into a "separate place of heart" altogether impossible.
Now poetry was asked to give up the contemplation of its contradictions and struggles to enter society, reality and take part in the general moment forward of the human spirit.
This meant two things: on one hand poetry was monumental, official and sang the greatness of England, or more often, poetry was asked to counterbalance the ethic, moral and human progress raised by scientific and technological progress. Darwinism had cast a powerful shade on the idea of creation and God. And the intellectual possibility of religious belief seemed to be on the point of dying, while scientific, political and philosophical materialism provided a new and more practical way of looking at things.
New ideas, however, gradually discarding all certainties and values did not offer solid ground and the age of progress began to coincide with an age of uncertainty and doubt.