Victorian poetry: an overview

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521883061.033

31 - Victorian poetry: an overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011

Richard Cronin

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Michael O'Neill

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Michael O'Neill: Affiliation:
University of Durham

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Summary

The Victorian poetry fair

There is no style that Victorian poets share. One reason for this is that they had too many styles to choose from. Every Victorian poet was something like Tennyson’s ‘Soul’ wandering through the palace of art: to assimilate Victorian culture was to be presented with a compendium so extensive and so miscellaneous that it resembled a curiosity shop rather than a museum:

Isaïah with fierce Ezekiel,

Swarth Moses by the Coptic sea,

Plato, Petrarca, Livy, and Raphaël,

And eastern Confutzee.

(‘The Palace of Art,’ 1832 text)

As a consequence, Victorian poetry, like Victorian architecture, was characteristically eclectic: it borrowed promiscuously from different historical periods and different poetic traditions. Victorian poets thought of themselves as ‘modern’ – the love they experienced was, in the title of Meredith’s great poem, Modern Love, the ill from which they suffered was what Arnold called ‘this strange disease of modern life’ (‘The Scholar-Gipsy,’ line 203) – but their modernity was of a special kind. It did not release them into a new life: rather they were modern in their awareness of themselves as experiencing an almost posthumous existence. As Isobel Armstrong notices, Victorian poetry was ‘overwhelmingly secondary’.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 576 - 595

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521883061.033 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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References

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