English IV: Regular Course: Victorian Poets

Victorian Poets

From Trust to Skepticism and Denial

Trust in a transcendental power was characteristic of the early Victorian writers. They were the immediate heirs of the Romantic idea of a finite natural world surrounded by and interfused with an infinite, ideal transcendental reality. The highest purpose of a poet, of any writer, was to make readers aware of the connection between earth and heaven, body and soul, material and ideal.

Fundamentally, as Thomas Carlyle wrote in his essay “The Hero as Poet,” reality is spiritual, a divine idea. “All Appearances, from the starry sky to the grass of the field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but vesture, the embodiment that renders it [the divine idea] possible.” The poet penetrates to the divine idea and makes it palpable in language and story to those of lesser power and vision. “That is always his message; he is to reveal that to us—that sacred mystery which he more than others lives ever present with.”

With some exceptions—Gerard Manley Hopkins is one and Christina Rossetti another—writers younger than Alfred Tennyson and Ruskin found it increasingly difficult to believe in an infinite power and order that made sense of material and human existence. Some simply thought it unnecessary. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling, in their different ways, celebrated a relation between humans and the natural world that could be joyous and even redemptive. Other writers at mid-century, sometimes reacting to explanations of the world that excluded the spiritual, were saddened by what seemed to them to be the withdrawal of the divine from the world. The dominant note of much mid-Victorian writing was struck by Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover Beach”: “The Sea of Faith,” Arnold wrote, had ebbed. There was no certainty; or if there was, what was certain was that existence was not governed by a benevolent intelligence that cared for its creatures.

By the end of the century, this skepticism and denial had become pervasive in the works of Hardy, Housman, and others. Early- and mid-Victorian novelists such as Dickens and George Eliot had dramatized a human ideal achieved through sympathy and unselfishness. They made sad or frightening examples of people like the Murdstones in David Copperfield and Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner—all hard surface and no soul. Their heroes and heroines learned to find happiness in nurturing marriages and in small communities of family and friends. But there were few such marriages and communities in the fiction and poetry of Hardy and Housman. These late-Victorian writers told stories of lovers and friends bereft and betrayed by unfaithfulness, war, and the other troubles that humans add to the natural troubles of mortal life.

Revealing Reality, Creating Coherence

Victorian writers had purposes as various as the ideas of reality they believed in. Some writers wanted to scare or shame readers into effective moral and political actions that they optimistically believed were possible. Some wanted to show readers what it is like to live in a pleasurable moment of intense feeling like that caught in a lyric or in the interesting perspectives of a character in a dramatic monologue or novel. Victorian literature entertained, informed, warned, and reassured.

Even the playfulness of Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde shows the two most important and consistent purposes or effects of Victorian literature. The first was to make readers hope, or wonder if, reality was really like that—really as whole and satisfying as in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, as briskly coherent as in a poem by Browning or an essay by Macaulay. The second principal purpose or effect was to demonstrate that, however bleak and chaotic reality seemed to be, the writer and reader could make a pleasing order in it. Even when a story or poem said that the world was ugly or made no sense, the story or the poem could seem beautiful and make sense to its audience. In every successful act of writing and reading literature, one more satisfyingly coherent thing in the world is created or discovered.

Finally, it is important to remember that these purposes and effects happened first to readers who were living Victorian lives. Victorian literature did not exist above or outside the comfortable and often confident lives of its readers. Many of the people who read Dickens settled down with his books after dining in rooms as garishly decorated as the Veneerings’. Most of the young men and women who thrilled to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sensualism and to Housman’s tender gloom probably moved on to make proper and modestly happy marriages and to find worthy occupations. People who were making a lot of money listened to Carlyle and Ruskin telling them that they were foolish and damned. People who were disturbed by how much money was being made listened to Macaulay reminding them that a century or so before they might not have been able to afford, or even to read, his book.
Victorian literature needs to be read not just as a comment on the complexity of its culture, but also as an important part of that culture. Its writers sent their words to work in the world to alter, to reinforce, to challenge, to enlarge, or to temper the ideas and feelings with which their contemporaries managed their lives.

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Let's read the following Victorian poems, considering how each poet fits into the above historical overview. Consider also checking out a bit of each poet's biography by tripping over the hyperlinked name.