VICTORIAN POETRY

During Victoria's reign poetry become more concerned with social reality and was expected to express the intellectual and moral debate of the age; this meant the creation, on one hand, of monumental poetry linked to the myth and belief in the greatness of England and, on the other, a poetry of anti myth and disbelief which had to solve the ethical problems raised by the contrast between science and progress.

The new figure of the poet was that of a prophet and a philosopher; people expected the poet to reconcile faith and progress and throw a certain coloring of romance over anti romantic materialism of modern life. Optimists believed that the benefits of progress could be reached without altering traditional social organization or destroying the beauty of the countryside; they wanted to find a corresponding attitude in their poets and to be told that modern life was as susceptible to Romantic behavior as the remote legends of king Arthur or the Italian Renaissance which was the background to many poems of Browning.

The major poets of the age were: Alfred Tennyson who was appointed poet laureate by Queen Victoria after Wordsworth; Robert Browning who is remembered as an original creator of characters in his best dramatic monologues; Elizabeth Barrett Browning who wrote beautiful love sonnets; Gerard Manley Hopkins mated in particular for his sprung rhythm which broke with conventional rule; Matthew Arnold who used poetry to express his dissatisfaction with the state of things;

In the Middle years of the century a group of some poets and painters, who called themselves Preraphaelites, tried to react against a society which destroyed the beauty of nature. They tended to see poetry and material progress as opposites, and did not try to reach a compromise between the two; they achieved more satisfactory results in the visual arts than in poetry. This group paved the way to the Aesthetic Movement with its creed of art for art's sake. 

Victorian poetry inherited the Romantic contradictions between heart and head. Reason on the one hand, and feeling, fancy, imagination, on the other. Romanticism had, as general rule, found a compromise between these 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, necessity.

The Victorian poet revived the struggle trying to reach a compromise denied from a heroic phase 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 in 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 Keat' s Ode on a Grecian Urn had become by his time incompatible than it had been during the early decades 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 the Romantics, imagination, inspiration poetry were organs of the truth and truth in themselves; the poet then should go to the marker-place and teach this 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" (Shelly), 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 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 palace of art" 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 movement forward of 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 problems raised by scientific and technological progress. Darwinism had cost a powerful shade on the idea of creation and God and the intellectual possibility if 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 old certainties and values, did not offer a new solid drama, 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, doubtful 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 is love". Where love coinciding with 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 power was a deliberate attempt to win back a public that poetry had lost to the novel.