The Victorian Poem Weighed

The idea

Victorian poetry answered the Romantics with objectivity, social engagement and doubt. The age of railways, slums, reform and empire, and of Lyell and Darwin, unsettled faith, and the poets made that unsettling their subject. Tennyson, the Laureate, mourned Hallam in In Memoriam, where nature is red in tooth and claw and honest doubt holds more faith than creeds, sent Ulysses out to strive and not to yield, and set the Lady of Shalott against her mirror. Browning perfected the dramatic monologue, a speaker, a silent listener and an unintended revelation, in the jealous Duke of Ferrara, the strangler of Porphyria and the dying Bishop, and multiplied it in The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning claimed the sonnet sequence and the verse novel and protested child labour. Arnold heard the Sea of Faith's withdrawing roar on Dover Beach, and Clough wrote his ironies of doubt. The Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti and Morris, turned to medieval detail and devotion, and Christina's "Goblin Market" told temptation and rescue as a fairy tale. Hopkins, a Jesuit published only in nineteen eighteen, invented sprung rhythm and inscape to praise God in dappled things, then wrote terrible sonnets of desolation. By the century's end, Swinburne and the aesthetes sought art for art's sake, Housman mourned lost youth, Hardy turned to bleak verse and Kipling sang soldiers and empire while warning, lest we forget. To answer a question on Victorian verse, separate speaker from poet, listen for the sound, and ask how the poem meets the age's doubt.