ABSTRACT

This will be the shortest section of the book; more an interchapter than a chapter. The Victorian poets, by which I mean those whose reputations were made and sustained between the 1830s and the 1890s, are often celebrated as the most skilled and meticulous stylists of post-Renaissance English verse, and it is for this reason that their work will be treated more economically than that of their predecessors and successors. The stylistic and formal paradigms that the Victorians inherited from three centuries of writing would be perfected, extended, even challenged, but they would not in any significant way be altered. The term Victorian poetry is a rather vague methodological convenience. Tennyson and Browning (born between 1809-12) and Arnold, Swinburne, Hardy and Hopkins (born 1822-44), are effectively the second and third generations of Romanticism. But they are also, in a less tangible way, the anxious and uneasy final stage in what is variously termed traditionalism or pre-modernism. These two elements-the Romantic affiliation to poetry as the supremely subjective medium for expression and poetry as a particular system of prescribed devices-are the unifying features of Victorian verse.