previous generation—the Romantic poets—had been so great and so unprecedented that one could not equal them. Both modernity and a sense of completion led to an underlying feeling of living in a post-historical age, long before the term was used.

All of this was reflected by Tennyson, Browning, and others in widely different ways. Tennyson focused much of his work on England's distant past, on the seminal Arthurian legends. This was partly because the primal myth of the English people was a symbol of a past golden age that contrasted with the harsh, mechanized world of the present. But it was also because the legends were seen as a distant mirror of the modern era. The ideal Arthurian world had come apart through treachery and the inevitable failure of man to achieve or sustain perfection. In his Idylls of the King, Tennyson has the dying Arthur say,

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways.

Tennyson is referring to his own age as well. In Ulysses, the concept is similar; the Greek hero knows his time is past, but defiantly (though in a tone of ambiguous regret) asserts that

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Tennyson's poetry as a whole is dominated by a dreamlike melancholy. Even in "Locksley Hall," where the speaker looks forward to an age when man will fly and the world will be united, it is with a sense of undesired inevitability that the world is depicted as changing. Locksley Hall, the symbol of the past, will be destroyed, and the poet knows this, though he wishes this were not so even while he commands it to happen.

Browning expresses the spirit of the age in his own way, and his outward optimism may appear the opposite of Tennyson's manner. But he, too, writes in an escapist manner. His first major work, Sordello, is a mammoth epic about medieval Italy written in obscure phrasing that makes it practically unreadable. His most famous poems focus upon figures of the distant past such as Andrea del Sarto and Rabbi Ben Ezra. He has the latter declare,

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be.

Though this is stated in Browning's usually robust, forceful manner, it represents wishful thinking, a defiance of reality. The same holds true for Andrea del Sarto's observation:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

Other writers of the period exemplify more directly the escapism and pessimism of the era. Swinburne, in his "The Garden of Proserpine," has his speaker quietly long for the eternal night of death. Matthew Arnold, in his "Philomela," merges the Greek myth with a symbol of modern suffering, asking the eponymous nightingale figure,

Dost thou to-night behold,
Here, through the moonlight on this English grass,
The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?

Finally, we should mention that the repression of sexual freedom in the Victorian age led to a veiled form of its expression in much of the fiction of the period. Works as diverse as Wuthering Heights,Tess of the d'Urbervilles ,The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula all deal with a covert but wild and even sadistic form of sexuality which is perhaps all the more disturbing because of the indirect way it is presented. Both the escapism of the poets and the underlying subversiveness in much fiction of the period were reactions to the deep-seated problems and concerns of the transforming Victorian world.

Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson are among the most esteemed poets of the Victorian era. Each reflects different trends in Victorian poetry, specifically the dramatic monologue and renewed interested in medieval legends.

Browning is considered a master of the dramatic monologue, a form in which the poem's speaker is addressing the reader and making an argumentative case. The psychology on display is usually nuanced, with a gap between what the speaker is saying and what is being implied or hidden. The best example of Victorian dramatic monologue is Browning's "My Last Duchess," in which a nobleman brags about the beauty of his late wife then reveals he killed her out of jealousy and a desire to control her absolutely. The character does not see his behavior as villainous and tries to make the homicide appear reasonable by claiming the duchess was too friendly with others.

Tennyson's poetry reflects the Victorian era's interest in medieval legends, particularly Arthurian legend. His work often gave these old stories new life, tying them to the concerns of the present day. His most famous Arthurian poem is "The Lady of Shallott," about the isolated Elaine of Astolat who leaves her tower prison and then dies en route to Camelot. The poem's tragic heroine has often been linked to Victorian ideas regarding gender roles, specifically the demand that women remain inside the domestic sphere and not venture into the public world. His other famous Arthurian work is Idylls of the King, which also explores Victorian concerns such as gender roles and the struggle with faith through medieval romance.