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Victorian Poetry Lecture Summaries
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Filled with descriptions and examples of Victorian poetry taken straight from the lecture hall and with added details from tutorials. Detailed and very useful.
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ENGLISH POETRYVictorian Poetry
1837 – 1901
General
Victorian poetry
- Was very transgressional
o Moving from structural forms of poetry
§ Reliant on metre and stanzas
o To 20th century poetry
§ Free verse
§ Often only used rhyme sparingly
- Saw the rise and dominance of the novel
o A Tale of Two Cities
- Queen Victoria reigning from 1837 until to 1901
- Many different kinds of verse
o Poetry from other countries & continents
- Famous north American poets
- Seen what the British thought of the margins of empire
o Including from South Africa
- Can often be more complicated that it seems on the surface
o Ulysses
Background to the 19th century
A time of technological innovation
- Many new inventions arising from the industrial revolution
o Innovations
§ Steam power
§ Use of electricity for lighting
• Changed people’s lives positively and negatively
o Seen as one of the most disruptive aspects of the period
A time of scientific speculation
- Went hand in hand with the disruptive aspects of the technological innovation
- Examples
o Idea of natural selection
o Evolution
§ Charles Darwin – 1859
- Darwin
o Ideas were not the only unsettling scientific theories of the period
§ Charles Lyle
• Principles of geology in early 1830s
o Established that the Earth’s surface changed over time and this process had
been going on for thousands/ millions of years
- Reasons why these discoveries proved so disruptive and divisive
o Challenged many strongly held religious beliefs and doctrines
§ See with some of the poets
• Many intellectuals began to doubt the truth of their religious beliefs/ faith
o Most Victorian people still had adherence of Christianity
o The era was soften characterised with one of extreme doubt and was more
complicated that was painted
A time of cultural nostalgia
- The dramatic changes within science and technology made some poets nostalgic of the supposedly simpler
and heroic times
o E.G.
§ Middle ages
, § Ancient Greece
§ Ancient Rome
- Cultural nostalgia is not the only explanation for this looking back to the past and awes this merely as an
escapism
- Reflected a growing historic consciousness on the pass of the increasingly educated and well-read Victorian
middle class
o Could fruitfully compare this with our own times interest in fantasy fiction, films and television series
§ Lord of the Rings trilogy
§ Game of Thrones
• Many of these fantasy depictions of quasi-medieval worlds owe a great deal to the
Victorian interests in and workings of Arthurian romance and other writings from the
middle ages
Poets
Matthew Arnold
- 1822 – 1888
- “Deeply unpoetic era”
- Son of equally renowned Victorian, Dr Thomas Arnold
o Headmaster of rugby school , well known public school
- Became an inspector of schools
- Graduated from Oxford
- Became strong and articulate advocate for study of the bible and the humanities
- Despite. His championing of the biblical studies, seemed to have struggle with feelings of doubt and
uncertainty about his Christian faith throughout his life
- After 1867
o He gave up writing poetry and focussed instead on literary and cultural criticism
- Dover Beach
o One of the most famous Victorian poems on doubt and faith
o 1867
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- 1809 – 1892
- Was & remains probably the most popular Victorian poet
- Was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain from 1850 to 1892
- The Charge of the Light Brigade
- In Memoriam A.H.H.
o Sequence of lyrics written to commemorate his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam
o
- Wrote many poems on legendary and mythological subject matter
o Which despite being based on classical and medieval sources
§ Often in strikingly new in poetic forms and genres
- Ulysses
o Dramatic monologue
Gerald Manley Hopkins
- 1844 – 1889
- studied at Oxford
- Converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866
o Ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1877
- Stopped writing poetry for a while as a young priest because he felt it would interfere with his vocation
o Resumed in 1875 after being asked by his religious superiors to write a poem commemorating the
sinking of a German ship, the Deutschland, in a storm
- Most of Hopkins’ poetry is religious
o Often unorthodoxly expressed
- Few of his poems were published during his life time
o Most of his poems were only published in the 20th century
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