Victorian Poetry

The division of poetry into periods is artificial and yet not without reason and its uses. If we look at the poets of an age at close quarters we shall commonly find little rese...

Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The date is not an inconvenient one to set at the beginning of a study of the poetry of the age to which she gave her name. Shelley, B...

By the time the Victorian masters were beginning to write, the English language, in the common use of it, had thus gone through many adventures. Shaping itself to the typical or...

First in these lines is apparent a poetic virtue of which Tennyson was an almost constant master, the faculty for seeing a natural object in minutely exact definition. “Thro’ th...

O lyric love, half-angel and half-bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,-- Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindre...

Broadly speaking, Tennyson and Browning have come in general opinion to stand as the two chief figures in Victorian poetry. Personal revisions of this estimate are constantly be...

So much for the Tennysonian influence upon Victorian technique, and the questions arising from the work of poets who were subject to, or part of, that influence. The manner whic...

In the scheme of the present study no more need be said of the technical side of Victorian poetry, nor need anything at all be said of such specific matters of technique as rhym...

Nothing is easier than for one age to be shallow and arrogant about the spiritual and intellectual preoccupation of another. To active minds, even the most cynical among them, l...

There would seem to be two different kinds of material upon which the poetic faculty can be employed. The old distinction of subjective and objective has become loose in usage,...

The point of attack chosen by most of Tennyson’s detractors is the _Idylls of the King_. Detraction is ultimately a very inconsiderable force in the world, being exposed readily...

This element in the management of the poetic function, which sometimes in Tennyson became a weakness, was one which left its traces upon the volume of Victorian poetry as a whol...

In nothing did the Victorian genius justify itself more fully than in its love poetry. Love, a theme which, apart from the Augustan silence which was broken only by such stray p...

Nothing is vainer than for criticism of poetry to suppose that it can give anything of the pleasure to be found in poetry itself. In making these notes about Victorian poetry, a...