Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
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 comparison between the different levels of experience.
The romantic poet, sooner or later, had abandoned the struggle to seek refuge in the self-suffition world of poetry removed from history, time, reality and necessity.
The Victorian poet removed the struggled: trying to reach a compromise denied from the heroic phase of Romanticism. The new age, an age of facts, demanded on 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 result of Romanticism as Keat's Odes (Ode on a Grecian Urn) had become by this time incompatible than it had been during the early dedades of the century.
Romantic poetry is both the assertion of his own impossibility of his coping with the world and the contemplation of its inadequacy to change the world.
For the Victorians as for the Romantics, imagination, inspiration poetry where organs of Truth and Truth in themselves; the poet then should go to the market place and teach his role. The Romantics, however denied the possibility not only of technology but even of communicating with the large masses of could not understand the high message of poetry.
So all the "base company" (Shelly), that is the borates part of society was simply cut off from the poetic message and poetic truth. Is we consider the revolutionary, 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 the extreme romantic refuge into a "separate place art" al together impossible. Now poetry was asked to give up the contemplation of it contradictions and struggles to enter society, reality and take part in the general movement 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 counterbalcance the ethic, moral and human problems 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.