Student Question
What is Victorian poetry?
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Victorian poetry, from the era of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), reflects the period's economic and social changes. While novels dominated, poetry remained significant, with poets like Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Alfred Tennyson. Victorian poetry often contrasts the industrial present with an idealized past, as seen in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. It features irony, reader engagement, and enjambments, with poets like Hopkins using these to express personal and spiritual tensions.
The influential and long-lasting reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) gives its name also to the literary production of the period which was characterized by important economic and social changes. Although the genre of the novel was best suited to represent these upheavals and thus became the predominant genre of the era, poetry was still a significant part of literature. Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Lord Alfred Tennyson, as well as Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante and Christina Rossetti, were important Victorian poets; Thomas Hardy and Gerald Manly Hopkins, whose poetry was published posthumously at the turn of the century, extended their influence on to nineteenth-century modernism.
Victorian poetry is torn between the representation of the contemporary social and industrial landscape and the celebration of an idealized and mythical past. Tennyson's cycle of twelve narrative poems Idylls of the King (1859-1885), for example, is an idealized elegy on the medieval court of King...
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Arthur, but is often read as ametaphor for the anxieties in gender roles that were becoming increasingly fluid in the Victorian Age. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood invoked from its very name a return to medieval art (before Raphael, i. e. before the Renaissance).
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were more directly concerned with the representations of the masses and the poverty of urban landscape of the Victorian Age. Browning's "How it strikes a contemporary" in the collection Men and Women (1855) contains detailed observations of the characters who populated Victorian cities: "the cobbler," "the man who sliced lemons into drink," "the coffeecoffee-roaster's braziers, and the boys/ That volunteer to help him turn its winch." Barrett's "The Cry of the Children" (1842) lent support to child labor reform by exposing the industrial exploitation of children.
On a formal level, Victorian poetry is characterized by the use of irony and a direct implication of the reader in the scenes described (as in Browning's poem cited previously, "you stared at him, / And found, less to your pleasure than surprise, / He seemed to know you and expect as much"). There is also an extensive use of enjambments (or run-on lines) which forces out the traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet or the ballad, used by other authors. Hopkins especially communicates his personal and spiritual tensions thought this stylistic device.