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British Poetry

Notes place during this period—brought about because of the Industrial Revolution; so it’s not surprising
that the literature of the period is often concerned with social reform. As Thomas Carlyle (1795-
1881) wrote, “The time for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all kinds, is gone
by; it is a serious, grave time.”
Of course, in the literature from this period, we see a duality, or double standard, between the
concerns for the individual (the exploitation and corruption both at home and abroad) and national
success—in what is often referred to as the Victorian Compromise. In reference to Tennyson,
Browning and Arnold, E. D. H. Johnson argues: “Their writings... locate the centers of authority not
in the existing social order but within the resources of individual being.”
Against the backdrop of technological, political, and socioeconomic change, the Victorian Period
was bound to be a volatile time, even without the added complications of the religious and
institutional challenges brought by Charles Darwin and other thinkers, writers, and doers.

6.1.2 Victorian Period—Early and Late

The Period is often divided into two parts: the early Victorian Period (ending around 1870) and the
late Victorian Period. Writers associated with the early period are: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892),
Robert Browning (1812-1889), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Emily Bronte (1818-1848),
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), George
Eliot (1819-1880), Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) and Charles Dickens (1812-1870).
Writers associated with the late Victorian Period include: George Meredith (1828-1909), Gerard
Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Oscar Wilde (1856-1900), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936), A.E. Housman (1859-1936), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).
While Tennyson and Browning represented pillars in Victorian poetry, Dickens and Eliot contributed
to the development of the English novel. Perhaps the most quintessentially Victorian poetic works
of the period is: Tennyson’s “In Memorium” (1850), which mourns the loss of his friend. Henry
James describes Eliot’s “Middlemarch” (1872) as “organized, moulded, balanced composition,
gratifying the reader with the sense of design and construction.”

6.2 Pre-Raphaelite Poetry

The term Pre-Raphaelite, which refers to both art and literature, is confusing because there were
essentially two different and almost opposed movements, the second of which grew out of the first.
The term itself originated in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an influential group of
mid-nineteenth-century avante garde painters associated with Ruskin who had great effect upon
British, American, and European art. Those poets who had some connection with these artists and
whose work presumably shares the characteristics of their art include Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
The second form of Pre-Raphaelitism, which grows out of the first under the direction of D.G.
Rossetti, is Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, and it in turn produced the Arts and Crafts Movement,
modern functional design, and the Aesthetes and Decadents. Rossetti and his follower Edward
Burne-Jones (1833-1898) emphasized themes of eroticized medievalism and pictorial techniques
that produced moody atmosphere. This form of Pre-Raphaelitism has most relevance to poetry; for
although the earlier combination of a realistic style with elaborate symbolism appears in a few
poems, particularly those of the Rossettis, this second stage finally had the most influence upon
literature. All the poets associated with Pre-Raphaelitism draw upon the poetic continuum that
descends from Spenser through Keats and Tennyson—one that emphasizes lush vowel sounds,
sensuous description, and subjective psychological states.

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