paper-6 , the victorian literature

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Name: Brijal N. Oza

Course: M.A. English (SEM. – 2)

Paper no. : 6, the Victorian Age

Topic: Victorian Age and its Poet

Roll no.: 23

Year: 2015 – 2017

Email ID: brijaloza1994@gmail.com

Submitted to: S.B. Gardi Department of English

                        M.K. Bhavnagar University

              VICTORIAN AGE and ITS POETS

vIntroduction of the Victorian Age:

                        The Victorian Age is known as “The Modern Period of Progress and Unrest”.

                        The Victorian Age is believed to be from 1850 – 1900, when Victoria became Queen in 1837. English literature seemed to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the romantic age.

                       

                        Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Scott had passed away. Keats and Shelley were dead but already there had appeared three disciples of those poets who were destined to be far more widely read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry since 1827, his first poems appearing in almost simultaneously with the last works of Byron, Shelley and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the publication of his collected poems, two volumes that England recognized in him one of her great literary leaders.

                        Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been writing since 1820. Browning had published his ‘Pauline’ in 1833. But in 1846, when ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ were published, people began reading his works and started appreciating him. A group of pose writers had emerged in like Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle and Ruskin.

                        In this age, the long struggle of the Anglo-Saxons for personal liberty was settled and democracy was established. The house of commons becomes the ruling power in England and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the surface, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the men who shall represent them.

       The Poets of the Victorian Age     

·      Alfred Tennyson

·      Robert Browning

·      Elizabeth Barrett Browning

·      Matthew Arnold

·      Dante Gabriel Rossetti

·      William Morris

·      Algernon Charles Swinburne

·      Arthur Hugh Clough

                Brief Introduction of all Poets

vALFRED TENNYSON:

                Tennyson was born in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. The sweet influences of his early natural surroundings can be better understood from his early poems than from any biography.

                Tennyson’s life is a remarkable one in this respect, that from beginning to end he seems to have been dominated by a single impulse, the impulse of poetry. He had no large or remarkable experience, no wild oats to sow, any great successes or reverses, any business cares or public offices. Tennyson was naturally shy, retiring, and indifferent to men, hating noise and publicity, loving to be alone with nature like Wordsworth. Throughout the entire Victorian period Tennyson stood at the summit of poetry in England. For nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet; “he was a voice, the voice of a whole people”. In the wonderful variety of his verse he suggests all the qualities of England’s greatest poets.      

                In reflecting the restless spirit of this progressive age, Tennyson is as remarkable as Pope was in voicing the artificially of the early 18^th century. As a poet, who expresses not so much a personal as a national spirit, he is the most representative literary man of the Victorian era. At the outset of our study of Tennyson’s works, it may be well to record two things, by way of suggestion.

First: Tennyson’s poetry is not so much to be studied as to be read and appreciated; he is a poet to have open on one’s table, and to enjoy as one enjoys his daily exercise.

Second: We should by all means begin to get acquainted with Tennyson in the days of our youth.

Tennyson’s poetry is to be externally young, and like Adam in Paradise, to find every morning a new world, fresh, wonderful, inspiring, as if just from the hands of God.

                In his poems, ‘The Princess and Maud’, a long poem by over three thousand lines of blank verse. Another work of Tennyson is ‘In Memoriam’, which on account of both its theme and its exquisite workmanship, is “one of the few immortal names that were not born to die”. The immortality of human love is the theme of the poem, which is made up over one hundred different lyrics. Another one is ‘The Idylls of the King’ ranks among the greatest of Tennyson’s later works.

                So, in a marvelously complex age, and amid a hundred great men, he was regarded as a leader. For a full half century he was the voice of England, loved and honored as a man and a poet.

vROBERT BROWNING:

                Robert Browning was born on 7^th May, 1812 and died on 12^th December, 1889. He was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the most Victorian poets.

                It was an obscure early poem ‘Pauline’ that brought him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By the time of his wife’s death (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) in 1861, his stock was beginning to rise with a major collection ‘Men and Women’ followed by the long blank verse poem ‘The Ring and the Book’. He is better known today for his shorter poems such as ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and ‘How Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’.

                He was a great admired of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley. In March 1833, Pauline a fragment of a confession was published, it is a long poem composed in homage to Shelley and somewhat in his style. In 1834, began writing ‘Paracelsus’ which was published in 1835. In 1838, he visited Italy, looking for background for ‘Bordello’, a long poem in heroic couplets, presented as the imaginary biography of the Mantuan bard spoken of by Dante in the divine comedy. ‘Canto 6 of Purgatory’, this was published in 1840 and met with widespread division, gaining him the reputation of Wanton carelessness and obscurity.

                 ‘The Ring and the Book’ was the poet’s most ambitious project and arguably his greatest work; it has been praised as a dramatic poetry, published in four volumes from November 1868 throughout February 1869, the poem was a success both commercially and critically and finally brought Browning the renown he had sought for nearly forty years.

                 

vMATTHEW ARNOLD:

“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things”.  –Matthew Arnold

                Matthew Arnold (24^th December, 1822-15 April, 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. Arnold published his second volume of poems in 1852, he published poems: ‘A New Edition’, a selection from two earlier volumes famously excluding Empedocles on Etna, but adding new poems, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ and ‘The Scholar Gipsy’.

                In 1854, ‘Poems: Second Series’ appeared; also a selection, it is included the new poem, ‘Balder Dead’. Arnold is sometimes called the third lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Arnold was keenly aware of his place in poetry.

                In his poetry, he derived not only the subject matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or literary sources but even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier.

v   WILLIAM MORRIS:

                William Morris was an English poet, English textile designer, novelist, translator and social activist. He achieved success with the publication of his epic poems and novels namely ‘The Earthly Paradise’ (1868-70). His first poems were published when he was 24 years old. His first volume, ‘The Defense of Guinevere and Other Poems’ (1858) was the first book of pre-Raphaelite poetry to be published. ‘The Haystack in the Floods’ is his one of the best known poem. One early, minor poems were ‘Masters in his Hall’ (1860), a Christmas Carol written to an old French time. Another Christmas theme poem is ‘The Snow in the Street’.      

vDANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI:

                Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848, with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.

                His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterized by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life.

                He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ (1849), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as ‘Goblin Market’ by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. He worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante’s ‘La Vita Nuwa’.

vALGERNON CHARLES SWINNBURNE:

                Algernon Charles Swinburne was one of the most accomplished lyric poets of this age and was a prominent symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. Later works are ‘By the North Sea’, ‘Evening on the Broads’, ‘The Lake of Gaube’.

vELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING:

                Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on 6^th March, 1806 and died on 29^th June, 1861. He was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime.

                Her first adult collection, ‘The Seraphim and  prolifically between 1841-1844 producing poetry. Elizabeth’s volume ‘poems’ (1844) brought her great success.

                She is remarkable for poems like ‘How Do I Love Thee’ and ‘Aurora Leigh’. She wrote her own Homeric epic ‘The Battle of Marathon: A Poem’. Her first collection of poems, ‘An Essay on Mind’, with other poems, was published in 1826 and reflected her passion for Byron and Greek politics.   
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