ABSTRACT
Browning died in 1889, Tennyson in 1892. Did Victorian poetry die with them? Perhaps the deaths of these colossus-like and prolific writers effectively terminate what we think of as Victorian poetry. They may have seemed oldfashioned and outmoded to younger poets, but they continued to write on questions central to the later part of the century until the end of their writing lives. In Idylls of the King Tennyson adumbrated the fatal soul/matter split, the dualism which so preoccupied Swinburne and which presages the new aesthetic of symbolism. Browning, still exceptionally responsive to his culture in the last twenty years of his life, was capable of moving from the exploration of violence and the problems around representation relevant to the 1867 Reform Bill in The Ring and the Book (1868) to the brilliant colonial critique, ‘Clive’, a poem about the damaging and contradictory codes of masculinity and honour in the closed world of Anglo-India, in the second series of Dramatic Idylls (1880).
