Essay On Victorian Poetry

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1.1 The Victorian poetry debate The word ‘Victorian’, is a term which often “loses any claim to specificity” (Bristow 2). When looking for a definition of the word ‘Victorian’, one cannot but acknowledge that it is inextricably linked to the reign of Queen Victoria. The Online Cambridge Dictionary, for instance, merely defines the term as “belonging to, made in, or living in the time when Queen Victoria was queen of the UK (1837–1901)”. The term ‘Victorian’ is becoming merely a marker for a historical period, without any socio-cultural connotations. In: Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), Isobel Armstrong claims how wrong it is to conceive of Victorian poetry as merely characterized by belonging to a certain period in history (1). According to her, Victorian poetry was born as a bridge between transitions from Romanticism to modernism (1). Indeed, when looking at history from a different perspective, one could also argue that the early Victorians were late Romantics; Joseph Bristow even classifies certain authors from the Victorian era as “Romantic Victorians” (2)In other words, the transition from Romanticism to ‘Victorianism’ did not happen overnight. However, for the Victorians…show more content…
In the early Victorian poetry rise poets as : Alfred Tennyson (a Poet Laureate who adopted the conventional religious and social views and values of his age), Robert Browning with a higher reputation as the writer of dramatic monologue,Elizabeth Barrett Browning andGerard Manley Hopkins, who used poetry to express his dissatisfaction with the state of things. The spirit of pessimism and doubt, the spirit of desire for the lost, past and ideal and the thirst for beauty, love and art are some features of Tennysonian poetry.Tennyson was more concerned with the individual in society while Browning was concerned with the individual as an eccentric, and his verse was more abrupt and difficult to

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