12 - Poetry

Summary

Fin de siècle poetry was often both anti-Victorian and anti-bourgeois in spite of the fact that its authors were frequently middle-class Victorians. While Victoria's reign did not end until 1901, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century poetry was moving away from those forms and styles that had come to be considered most quintessentially Victorian. By the time a sense of 'Victorian' values and aesthetics had been recognised and labelled as such, poets were able self-consciously to define their work in opposition to them, sometimes explicitly disavowing any affinity. It is for this reason that the last quarter of the century is often identified with the death of the Victorian aesthetic, and Decadence perceived as the wringing out of the last drops of a faded and over-played aesthetic. Yet, if this was the period in which Victorian poetry died, it was without a doubt the period in which many new poetries were born. In comparison with the lucrative novel, the economic marginality of poetry by this point in the century undoubtedly put it in a different relationship with its recent heritage. Much less likely to be loyal to tried and tested formulas, poetry begins to see itself as avant-garde. What we see in poetry of the period is not so much the limbo of 'transition' to modernist concerns, however, but what Richard Le Gallienne identified as a self-conscious desire for a new aesthetic and a new beginning.

The death of Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1892 can be seen as a symbolic marker of the fate of Victorian poetry. The well-attended funeral demonstrated that many ordinary people, whether or not they read poetry, felt the poet laureate represented something significant about national identity and pride. After Tennyson died, however, the post remained empty until the unexpected appointment of Alfred Austin in 1896.