VICTORIAN POETRY

Victorian poetry inherited the romantic contradictions between heart and head.

Reason on the one hand, and feeling, fancy and imagination on the other. Romanticism had, on 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 fase 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" (Mattew Arnold); it is therefore easy to understand how the new ground and the idea of poetry that a poet like Tennyson had inherited from such extreme results of Romanticism.

Ode on a Grecian Urn had become by this time incompatible than it had been during the early decade of the century. Romantic poetry is both the assertion of its own impossibility of coping with the world and the contemplation of its own inadequacy to change the world. For the Victorians as for Romantics, imagination, inspiration were organism of truth and truth in themselves. The poet then should go to the marketplace and teach his truth.

The Romantics however denied the possibility not only of teaching but even of communicating with the large masses who could not understand the high message of poetry. So all the "base company" (P.B.Shelley) that is the broadest part of society was simply cut off from the poetic message, and poetic truth.

If we consider the revolutionary, radical ideas of Romanticism, this is of course his 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 of heart all together impossible.

Now poetry was asked to give up the contemplation of its contradictions and struggles to enter society and reality to take part in the general movement forward of human spirit.

This meant to think: on one hand poetry was monumental official and saying the greatness of England, or more often poetry was asked to counterbalance the ethic, moral and human problems raised by scientific and technical problems. Darwinism had cast a powerful shade on the idea of creation and God, an the intellectual possibility of religious belief seemed to be on the point of dying, while scientific, political and philosophical naturalism provided a new and more practical way of looking at things.

New ideas, however, gradually discarding all certainties and values, did not offer new solid ground, and the age of progress began to coincide with an age of uncertainty and doubt.

Poetry was required not only to pose questions, but also to provide a set of values.

Most of Victorian poetry, nevertheless, in the face of this kind of problem, adopted a melancholic tonality, singing loss and decay, doubt and fear.

Death, one way or another, seems to be the muse of Victorian poetry. From this point of view two lines of Christina Rossetti seem to synthesize the prevalent mood of the age:

"Loss and decay, and death

and all his love"

Where love coinciding with the loss, decay and death is first of all a synonym for poetry.

As regards prosody and experimentalism, the only poetic forms developed during the period were the verse novel and the dramatic monologue.

The former was a deliberate attempt to in back a public that poetry had lost to the novel.