Assignment Paper 6 Victorian Literature

Name : Ruchita Kankrecha A

Roll no. : 29

Paper no. : Victorian age

Topic name : Victorian poets

Enrolment no : 20691084190024

Email Id : ruchikankrecha06@gmail.com

College : Department of English

Submitted to : Department of English M. K Bhavnagar University

“I cannot rest from travel : I will drink

Life to the less : all times I have Enjoy’d

Greatly, have Suffer’d greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea : I am become a name;”

                        ( Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson)

Introduction :

In the history of English literature, there are many periods likes the age of Elizabethan, The puritan age, The age of restoration, 18^th century literature, The age of Romantic, The Victorian age and 20^th century literature. So all age has their own characteristics and writer or poets. I would like to talk about the age Victorian and poets like Tennyson and Browning. This period is also known as ‘The age of Queen Victoria’.

Brief Introduction about Victorian age :

The term ‘Victorian age’ is often used to cover the whole of the nineteenth century. The Victorian age started in during the reign of Queen Victoria and the age Victorian is one of the most remarkable period in the history of England. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, at a time when the monarchy as an institution was not particularly popular but after something the monarch assumed a grater symbolic important. A history of the Victoria age records a period of Economic expansion and rapid change and it was an era of Material influence, political consciousness, industrial and Mechanical progress, social unrest, Education expansion and many other things that are important for their nation.

     “The Victorian period is also known as an era of peace. “

Literary features of the Victorian age :

1.           Morality

2.           The revolt

3.           Intellectual development

4.           The new Education

5.           International influences

6.           The achievement of the age

Victorian poetry :

Poetry written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria referred as Victorian poetry. The poet of this period are known for their interest in verbal embellishment mystical, interrogation and brooding Skepticism. In this age there were many poets. Included, two major poets are

1.            Alfred Lord Tennyson

2.            Robert Browning

 some minor poets like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Edward Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow etc.

1.           Alfred Lord Tennyson ( 1809-92) :

Lord Tennyson is the representative poet of the Victorian age. His poetic activity extended over sixty years. In his life he faces many problems. Circumstances of his family was not good. ‘poems chiefly Lyrical’ ( 1830) is a collection of poems which are immature in poetic excellent and are remarkable for pictorial effects. ‘Poems ‘ (1833) which contain such memorable poems as

1.           The Lady of Shallott

2.           Oenone

3.           The Lotos Eaters and

4.           The places of Art, marks a decided advance in Tennyson’s poetic art.

He also produced two volumes in 1842. The first volume consists mostly of revised version of poems which had already been published. The second volume consists of entirely new poems as Morte D’ Arthur, Ulysses, and Locksley. “The Princess” (1847) poem Written in Blank verse and contain some beautiful lyrics and the poem deals with the them of ‘the new woman’. In ‘Memoriam’, an elegy on the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, contains meditations of life and death. Some of other poems like Maud and other Poems (1855) and Enoch Arden and other poems (1855) did not add anything remarkable to his poetic art.

In 1859, 1869, and 1889 he issued a series of The Ldylls of the king which deals with the them of King Arthur and The Round Table. His other works which are also important are ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886) and ‘The Death of Bonone’ (1892).

Characteristics of Tennyson poetry :

Alfred Lord Tennyson was the best poet of the Victorian England. As W. J. Long remarks :

  “For nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet, he was a voice, the voice of a whole people, expressing in exquisite melody their doubts and their faith, their griefs and their triumphs. In the wonderful variety of his verse he suggests all the qualities of England’s greatest poets. “

Tennyson has carved for himself a permanent place in English poetry due to the following characteristics.

1.           The representative poet of the age :

His poetry is the most comprehensive representation of the spirit of the age. Stopford Brooke remarked :

      “For more than sixty years he lived close to the present life of England, as far as he was capable of comprehending and sympathising with its movements; and he inwove what he felt concerning it into his poetry. “

His poetry gave the Victorian what they desired. In all his poetry we can find feelings and tendencies like Moderation in politics, refined culture, religion liberalism, attachment to ancient institutions etc.

Tennyson is the most complete representative of the Victorian spirit of compromise. As regards sex problems, the main object of the Victorian was to discover some middle course between the unbridled licentiousness of previous ages and the complete negation of the function and purpose of nature. ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ is a story of married love, which Byron and Shelley could not envision.

He was not opposed to progress and development but he believed in slow and orderly development.

     “The old order changeth Yielding place to new

And God fulfils himself in many ways

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. “

2.           Religion and Science :

Religion and Science which stood in antagonism to each other, found an important place in his poetry. Tennyson tried to Evolve a compromise between Religion and Science. He propounded a via media between the materialistic Science of his day and dogmatic Christianity. He looked essential. He felt that science was both fruitful and important for progress. So he told his generation that the true religious man was the man of action. He told them :

   “There lives more faith in honest doubt,

     Believe men, than in half the creeds. “

He represents the Victorian spirit of compromise between science and religion when he writes :

       “Let knowledge grow from more and                       more

         But more of reverence in us dwell. “

3.           His Sense of low :

The dominant note in Tennyson’s poetry is his sense of law. The thing which impressed him most is the spectacle of order in the universe. He bestowed highest praise on England because she is

“A land of settled government

   A land of old and just renown

  Where freedom slowly broadens down

   From precedent to precedent. “

W. J. Long writes :

     “Law implies a source, a method, an object. Tennyson, after facing his doubts honestly find this law even in the sorrows and losses of humanity. He gives this law a personal and infinite source and find the supreme purpose of all law to be a revelation of divine love. “

4.           His nature poetry :

Tennyson’s nature poetry bears the impact of contemporary science. It is seen in the minuteness and exactness of his observations. He saw nature with the eye of the science and his landscape painting shows that he was endowed with the exactitude of the botanist and the delicate sensibility of the artist. Nature for him is always a background for reflecting some human emotion. His native poetry is intellectual and world of nature is the world of ‘Imaginative scientific man ‘, who has an eye for beauty and a heart to feel it.

5.           Poetic craftsmanship :

Tennyson was a great and gifted poetic craftsman. His essentially the artist. His poetic style shows remarkable flexibility, which in every kind of poetry – the song, the idyll, the dramatic monologue, the dialect poem etc. He formed a poetic style of his own, of quite faultless precision – musical, simple and lucid. Tennyson’s method is to seize upon appropriate details, dress them in appropriate and musical phrases and thus to throw a glistening image before the reader’s eye.

2.           Robert Browning ( 1812-1889) :

Robert Browning was a versatile poet whose poetry is conspicuous for Optimism and he was influenced by Shelley and Browning. His earlier work ‘Pauline’ appeared in 1833. It was followed by ‘Paracelsus’ which reveals the poet’s faith in love and God. It is dramatic in form but lyric in spirit. ‘Sordello’ ( 1840) is an obscure work on the relationship between art and life. ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ ( 1846) is Collation of dramatic and miscellaneous poems.’ Dramatic Lyrics’ (1846) exhibits versatility of Browning’s poetic genius : tenderness in ‘Evelyn Hope’, passion in ’A Gondola’, subtlety in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, Intellectual brilliant in ‘My Last Duchess’, etc. His last volume ‘Asolando’ was published in 1899.

Characteristics of Browning’s Poetry :

Browning is an original poet and his poetry is remarkable for the following characteristics :

1.           His message or Optimism :

There is nothing doubtful, nothing pessimistic in the whole range of his poetry. He is a poet of hope and joy. His Optimism was a result of experience. Browning’s firm faith in the existence of god, who is all pervading, behind and all powerful, is the main source of his Optimism. In Pippa Passes he sings :

    “God is in his Heaven

    All is right with the world. “

Browning is a singer of the joys of life. The worldly pleasure, wisely used, are instrument to the mind, as food is an instrument to the body. There should be harmony and balance between the soul and the flesh. They supplement each other. In Rabbi Ben Ezra he condemn the opposition between the soul and the flesh :

   “Let us cry ‘All good things

     Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, nor

     Then flesh helps soul. “

Browning believes that the present earthly life is a probation for the life to come and we should face the trials and difficulties during the probationary period with courage.

2.           Browning as the singer of love :

Browning is an ardent singer of the glory of love. He is the poet wedded to love and his love poetry is realistic and intellectual.

       “Browning’s love poetry is the finest in the world because it does not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven. “

All love poems of Browning wheatear dealing with cases of successful love or failure in love end on a note of optimism and triumph. He treats love as a philosophic principle which harmonise and unifies all beings. It is the moral ideal towards which man must strive to advance:

        “O world, as god has made it all is beauty,

          And knowing this love, and love is dusty. “

3.           Browning as the writer of Dramatic Monologues :

Browning is a gifted poetic artist. His artistic principle is that a poet should under no circumstances, sacrifice sense to sound. Hence, he often seems to be careless to music and melody. But when sense and sound combine as they often do in his poetry, he is able to achieve a music more melodious and sweet, then cam even be possible for those who care for sound alone. Browning was great metrical artist and he invented a large variety of verse from and used them with consummate skill.

4.           Browning’s Obscurity :

Obscurity is a serious drawback in Browning ‘s poetry. Extreme compression and condensation of style also contribute to his Obscurity. His style is often telegraphic and inverted contributions abound. His stupendous learning and fondness for Latin quotations and expressions further complicate matters. He wrote with great rapidity and rush. The language at his command was poor instrument to render effectively and with the same speed the thoughts and ideas that flashed through his mind.

Browning’s conversation and realistic style influenced modern poets.

Conclusion :

So they are good poets of Victorian age. Browning had a remarkable sense of historical and Tennyson is the poet of human nature in its noble, common and loving forms.