The development of poetry in the Victorian age

Name: Baraiya Bhavna P.

Roll No: 03

Paper: The Victorian Literature

Topic: Development of Poetry in the               Victorian age

SEM: 02       

              

               The Development

                      Of Poetry

                In The Victorian Age

         

                    The Victorian epoch was exceedingly productive of literary work of a high quality, but, except in the novel, the amount of actual innovation is by no mean great. Writers were as a rule content to work upon formal models, and the improvements they did achieve were often dubious and unimportant.

The lyrical output:

                 The lyrical output is very large and varied, as a glance through the works of the poets already mentioned will show. In form there is little of fresh interest. Tennyson was content to follow the methods of Keats, though Browning’s complicated forms and Swinburne’s long musical lines were more freely used by them than by any previous writers.

Descriptive And Narrative Poetry:

              In descriptive and narrative poetry there is a greater advance to chronicle. In subject –for example,

In the poems of Browning and Morris-there is great variety, embracing many climes and periods; in method there is much diversity, ranging from the cultured elegance of Tennyson’s English landscapes to the bold impressionism of the poems of Whitman. The pre-Raphaelite school, also united several features which had not been seen before in combination. These were a fondness for medieval themes treated in an unconventional manner, a richly coloured pictorial effect, and a studied and melodious simplicity. The works of Rosseetti, Morris, and Swinburne provide many examples of this development of poetry. On the whole we can say that Victorians were strongest on the descriptive side of poetry, which agreed with the more meditative habits of the period, as contrasted with the warmer and more lyrical emotions of the previous age.

                                   There were many attempts at purely narrative poetry, with interesting results. Tennyson thought of reviving the epic, but in him the epical impulse was not sufficiently strong, and his great narrative poem was produced as smaller fragments which he called idylls. Browning’s Ring and the Book is curious, for it can be called a psychological epic-a narrative in which emotion removes action from the chief place. In this class of poetry The Earthly Paradise of William Morris is a return to the old romantic tale as we find it in the works of Chaucer.

Style:

                        In the case of poetry the more ornate style was represented in Tennyson, who developed artistic schemes of vowel music, alliteration, and other devices in a manner quite unprecedented. The Pre-Raphaelites carried the method still further. In diction they were simpler than Tennyson, but their vocabulary was more archaic and their mass of detail more highly coloured. The style of Browning was to certain extent a protest against this aureate diction. He substituted for it simplicity and a heady speed, especially in his earlier lyrics; his more mature obscurity was merely an effect of his eager imagination and reckless impetuosity. Matthew Arnold, in addition, was too classical in style to care for overdeveloped picturesqueness, and wrote with a studied simplicity. On the whole, however, we can say that the average poetical style of this period, as a natural reaction against the simpler mathods of the period immediately preceding, was ornate rather than simple.   

Conclusion:

                             The major poets of the Victorian era are Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and Robert Browning (1812-1889). Both are prolific and varied, and their work defies easy classification.

                            Tennyson makes extensive use of classical myth and Arthurian legend, and has been praised for the beautiful and musical qualities of his writing.

                            Browning's chief interest is in people; he uses blank verse in writing dramatic monologues in which the speaker achieves a kind of self-portraiture: his subjects are both historical individuals (Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto) and representative types or caricatures (Mr. Sludge the Medium).

                    Other Victorian poets of note include Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is notable for his use of what he calls “sprung rhythm”; as in Old English verse syllables are not counted, but there is a pattern of stresses. Hopkins' work was not well-known until very long after his death.