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Victorian Poetry

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 0 )

“Victorian poetry” is a term that does not quite coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign that began with the death of her uncle, William IV, in 1837 and lasted until her own death some 63 years later on January 22, 1901. The great poets who wrote most or all of their work while she was queen (and later, starting in 1876, empress of India) include Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and A. E. Housman. Some of the poets we think of as major 20th-century figures began writing in the Victorian Age, most significantly, perhaps, William Butler Yeats, but also Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. The measure and historical importance of the Victorian period in literary history can be marked by the fact that William Wordsworth, who had seen the French Revolution, was still writing a decade after Victoria became queen, while Yeats (who would live until the eve of the Second World War) had already published some of his most important books before she died.

Mention of Yeats and Kipling in the same sentence suggests a different way of defining the Victorian era: Kipling feels Victorian in a way that Yeats does not, and this is because Kipling’s great poetry accepted as a fact of history Britain’s Victorian-style preeminence in the world, whereas Yeats joined with the moderns to see how all that was solid melted into the air—in particular the air of World War I (1914–18), which changed everything. As a cultural phenomenon, the Victorian era might be said to have come to an end in August 1914. Indeed, at the end of the era thus defined, some of the most significant late Victorian writers, such as Alice Meynell, began leading pacifist movements against the resurgent militarism and international violence that so characterized Europe in the first half of the 20th century.

Violence on the mechanized and global scale of the 20th century was one of the results of the seismic scientific and technological shifts that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century and spread throughout Europe and North America. If we put the end of the Victorian era at the beginning of World War I, we can say that it begins a little before Victoria’s accession, with the sudden and earthshaking discoveries of Victorian science. Tennyson and Browning, the two greatest Victorian poets, both took an intense interest in the revolutionary scientific discoveries of the day. The central and most revolutionary achievement of Victorian science was Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) discovery of the mechanism of evolution, the “Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” as the title page of the first edition of his book puts it. That book, generally known as On the Origin of the Species, appeared in 1859, the same year as Edward FitzGerald’s despairing celebration of the nothingness of human life in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, written partly in answer to Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. The first edition of In Memoriam had been completed 10 years earlier, so Darwin was not a shadow in Tennyson’s early world. But his gigantic shadow was, in fact, first cast by the discoveries and systematic exposition of Charles Lyell (1797–1875) in his Principles of Geology , published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833—the year that Arthur Henry Hallam (A.H.H.), Tennyson’s closest and most beloved friend, died at 22 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Lyell was one of the first to have an inkling of what has come to be called “deep time,” the shocking, almost infinite antiquity of the world—an antiquity that suggested an equally shocking future stretching uniformly ahead forever. Since it was really only in the 18th century that astronomers began to be aware of the vastness of space (no one knew that other stars were also suns until then), the scientific revolution that began with the Enlightenment and accelerated throughout the Victorian era was one that severely undercut human belief in transcendentalist idealism. The universe suddenly appeared too big to transcend, and as Tennyson put it, the muse of astronomy, Urania, rebuked the muse of elegy and tragedy, Melpomene, who replied, “A touch of shame upon her cheek; / ‘I am not worthy ev’n to speak / Of thy prevailing mysteries’” ( f , section 37, ll. 10–12).

For Tennyson, the death of Hallam was a catastrophic experience of the overwhelming of the human soul by an indifferent universe. Romantic poetry (see romanticism) had found a way to idealize human subjectivity as against the trash of mere empirical externality, but the cascading discoveries of science represented a kind of revenge on the part of the material world. In theory—romantic theory—the mind could transcend any world, no matter how great, because the world’s greatness was only relative, and the mind traffics with absolutes (see, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc ). But for the Victorians, the discovery of unimagined abysses showed that the world far outvied the mind when it came to imagination—nature’s indifferent, inhuman imagination (personified in In Memoriam ) made little of anything the human mind could offer from its own petty resources. In Memoriam and many other great Victorian poems struggled against this apprehension, but the struggle shows few of the transcendent and absolute victories to be found in the greatest romantic poets. (Browning’s essay on Shelley explicitly contrasts the objectivity of contemporary poetry—an objectivity he also ascribes to William Shakespeare—to romantic subjectivity.)

Accordingly, it might be more correct to say that the Victorian era is the era of perhaps the greatest minor poetry ever written in English. “Minor poetry” is not meant as a belittling term: The Victorians wrote in an age when for the first time, perhaps, poets were realizing that with respect to the world around it, poetry could only be minor. Tennyson, again, imagining a critic of the intense grief he displays in In Memoriam , asks: “Is this an hour / For private sorrow’s barren song, / When more and more the people throng / The chairs and thrones of civil power? / A time to quicken and to swoon, / When Science reaches forth her arms / To feel from world to world and charms / Her secret from the latest moon?” (section 21, ll. 13–20). Indeed, many still complain that Victorian literature marked the beginning of a general phenomenon of escapism which in the 20th century would become transmogrified into incessant television watching. (Victorian critics lambasted the widespread reading of novels in ways that the stern moralists of the second half of the 20th century lambasted the widespread failure to read novels instead of watching TV. These are really the same complaint.)

All of this means that Victorian literature in general and poetry in particular aimed at giving its readers pleasure. The Victorians could no longer quite believe—as Wordsworth had in the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)—that such pleasure could save the soul. The Victorians were the heirs of the romantics in many ways, not least in their sense that the pleasures of literature, difficult as they sometimes were, went as deep as the depth of the human soul. But for the Victorians, the human soul did not seem quite as deep as it did for their predecessors.

All of this is generalization, of course, but it is generalization that accounts for a range of Victorian reaction, from the insistence on the absolute accuracy to which human perception can attain, to be found in Arnold, to the counter-insistence on the primacy of subjective experience over any empirical accuracy, with which the essayist and critic Walter Horatio Pater countered Arnold, and which culminated in Wildean aestheticism. It also accounts for Yeats’s folkloric anachronizing on the one hand and the striking number of conversions to Catholicism, such as Hopkins’s, on the other, offering an account of the soul fiercely capable of the same minute severity as any faithchallenging science. Further, it accounts for the triumphal shrewdness of such a champion of ­English industrial and economic achievement as Kipling.

What these poets almost all share is a sense of poetry as giving pleasure. Once the burden is taken off literary pleasure as the royal road to transcendence, pleasure can be regarded as an end in itself, and the Victorians could write the kind of poetry that gave a purer pleasure than the strongly individualized poetic self-assertions to be found in the romantics. (John Keats is a partial exception and a high influence on the Victorians, especially on Tennyson.) If one thinks of the kind of poetry that we remember without remembering or caring who wrote it, then this is the kind of poetry that the Victorians wrote. This can be seen as much in the vogue for highly sophisticated dramatic monologues— as with Browning and Tennyson, who were inventing characters, not speaking for themselves—as in the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. It is no accident that Francis Turner Palgrave’s great and wildly successful anthology Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics was a product of the Victorian age and ended with a few contemporary poems (Palgrave thanked Tennyson in his introduction), and that almost all its selections, from whatever age, sound Victorian.

The character of Palgrave’s collection culled from various poets can be found in the kinds of collections that individual Victorian poets put together, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Similarly, among Tennyson’s most popular works were songs from the longer narrative works, such as the songs from The Princess: A Medley, which themselves are contextless, songs sung by characters, not spoken by them. FitzGerald pointed out that the Rubáiyát was an anthology (published alphabetically in Persian), which he gave the form of an eclogue (pastoral poem)—so that even when placed into a consecutive form, it is the stanzas that had priority, not the story they told. Even Tennyson described In Memoriam as a collection of lyrics, not as a consecutive work (though it is that, too, of course). Swinburne was another impresario of the evocative (partly through his study of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience ), and Yeats consistently described his poems as songs.

Idiosyncratic and unpredictable as so many of the Victorians were, they nevertheless wrote poems that people remember as poems rather than as the expressions of poets. They wrote poems that gave people pleasure as poems, and such pleasure is the most archaic and deeply rooted experience of poetry that any of us ever has. Thus, Melpomene, the muse of tragedy shamed by Urania’s rebuke in In Memoriam states that as an earthly muse, she owns “but a little art / To lull with song an aching heart, / And render human love his dues,” so that in the end her role is to intensify human experience, minor as it is compared to the transcendence where science and religion come together in the grandeur and immensity of the universe. She, on the other hand, ministering to purely human and earthly experience, has “darken’d sanctities with song” (section 37, l. 24).

None of this should suggest that Victorian poetry is cloying. Its intensity of grief and its apprehensions of despair rival those of any other poetic tradition or period. In fact, some of that intensity derives from a paradoxical acknowledgement of its uselessness. The idea that the human soul is minor, just as the poetry that soul expresses is minor, is a grim one—consonant with the Victorian insights of that greatest of analytic pessimists, Sigmund Freud. The Pre-Raphaelite poetry can have the last word here: The absolutely minor pleasures of decorative beauty—scorned as unworthy of poetry by too many grander aspirants—became for them the devastatingly precise detail which undercuts any notion of transcendence. (They are the forebears of such modern great poets as Elizabeth Bishop.) All there is, in the end, is the world of detail, without the saving importance that might turn loss into gain, as it did for the romantics, that might make pleasure any more than decorative. It is the success of Victorian poetry that it preserves the importance of the decorative, gives us something to hang onto on earth when there is nothing that poetry can communicate that will bring us into heaven.

Bibliography Browning, Robert. Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Reeves and Turner. 1888. Hough, Graham Goulden. The Last Romantics. London: Duckworth, 1949. Houghton, Walter Edwards. Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830– 1870. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957. Trilling, Lionel, and Harold Bloom. Victorian Prose and Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Ricks, Christopher, ed. The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry

Matthew Bevis is a University Lecturer and Fellow in English at Keble College, Oxford. His publications include Tennyson: Lives of Victorian Literary Figures (2003), The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (2007), Some Versions of Empson, ed. (2007), Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (2012), and Lessons in Byron (2013). He is currently co-editing a collection of essays on Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry and writing a book entitled Wordsworth’s Laughter.

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This Handbook is the largest and most comprehensive collection of essays on Victorian poetry and poetics yet published. It provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements ('Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'). The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, and the final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions.

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Victorian Poetry

Devin M. Garofalo , University of North Texas

Journal Details

Devin M. Garofalo

Founding Editor, 1962–1990

 John F. Stasny

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

See Victorian Poetry's submissions portal to submit a manuscript and for author guidelines .

Victorian Poetry has undergone a few significant transitions over the last year. The journal has a new editor, Devin M. Garofalo (University of North Texas), and a new publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press. Scholars wishing to submit their work for potential publication should do so via the new Scholastica submissions portal , which includes revised guidelines for article manuscripts, as well as information about special issues and the year’s work in review. Victorian Poetry is also pleased to announce our new early career essay prize and keyword series (more details below). Please direct any queries to the editor using the new journal email address: [email protected] .

Call for Submissions: Early Career Essay Prize

Victorian Poetry is pleased to announce a new prize recognizing exemplary essays by untenured scholars of all ranks and affiliations (including contingently employed and graduate student colleagues). Conferred on an annual basis by a committee comprised of members of the journal’s editorial board, the prize carries an award of $500 and publication in Victorian Poetry . Strong essays that do not win the award may also be considered for publication as recommended by the prize committee. Applications are due 30 June 2024. Scholars wishing to be considered should submit anonymized MS Word essays and brief CVs to [email protected] with “Early Career Essay Prize” in the subject line. Prior to submission, consult our guidelines for authors .

Winning articles will be selected according to three criteria: (1) significance of contribution to the field of Victorian poetry (including its involvement with Victorian studies and other areas of inquiry in or beyond literary studies); (2) excellence of research, interpretation, and method; and (3) efficacy of presentation. The journal continues to expand its purview to a wider compass of archives and approaches. We welcome work that capaciously (re)interprets the field's originary contexts and reconsiders Victorian poetry (broadly construed) in new, innovative, cross-disciplinary, theoretical, and / or experimental ways.

Call for Proposals: “Poetry’s Parts” Keyword Series

We invite proposals for short keyword essays (ca. 1,100 - 1,300 words) exploring Victorian poetry’s parts, whether formal (“sonnet”) or figural (“apostrophe”), cultural (“cosmopolitan”) or critical (“lyricization”). Considered and published on an ongoing basis (as opposed to appearing in a designated special issue), essays should apprehend pressing conceptual, aesthetic, historical, cultural, political, archival, and / or methodological questions and problems that shape the field (or, alternatively, that have been neglected to the field’s detriment). As warranted, authors might also consider the ways the field (as revealed by the keyword under discussion) is animated by or animates other (sub)disciplines or genealogies of thought in ways recognized or unrecognized.

Keywords need not be limited to those that fall strictly within the specialist purview of Victorian poetry. For instance, essays exploring the resonances of broad concepts such as “atmosphere” or “race” as refracted distinctively by and through Victorian poetry (broadly construed) are most welcome. Because these essays should make arguments as opposed to offering handbook-style overviews, proposals revisiting keywords explored in prior issues will eventually be welcome as the series unfolds. Pedagogical discussion may be appropriate if it serves an illustrative purpose that keeps in view the series’ focus.

Proposals are subject to editorial review (with an eye toward giving deliberate shape to the series, especially in its early stages) and keyword essays to peer review. If contemporaneous appearance in print is necessary for offering substantive insight, the editor will consider joint proposals (ideally, featuring scholars of different ranks and affiliations, on and off the tenure track), whether on the same keyword from quite distinct vantages or on different but productively entangled keywords. Joint proposals should be limited to two or three scholars, as larger groups are difficult to accommodate in print outside the confines of a special issue. Direct queries and proposals to the editor at [email protected] .

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning, E.B.B. (1806-1861)

Simon Avery, E.B.B. and The Woman Question

In this essay, Dr Simon Avery considers how Elizabeth Barrett Browning used poetry to explore and challenge traditional Victorian roles for women, assessing the early influences on her work and thought.

Essay: Simon Avery, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Woman Question”, The British Library. CC BY-NC 4.0

Across the course of the 19th century, the question of women’s roles and rights was fiercely and widely debated. How should women – and particularly  middle-class  women – be educated? What was their ‘proper’ place in society? Should they be allowed to work outside the home? Should they be able to vote and have a political voice? These and a range of other issues constituted what the Victorians termed ‘The Woman Question’, which was fervently analysed in discussion groups, in the press, in parliament, and in scientific and medical circles as women pushed for greater recognition and equality. Changes in social expectations and in legislation were achieved very slowly – the vote was only granted to women over 30 in 1918 and women over 21 in 1928, for example – but in the meantime the Woman Question was firmly on Britain’s social and political agendas. It was an area, too, where many women writers, including the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, made powerful and engaging contributions.

Early influences

Barrett Browning was always interested in the position of women in society, and throughout her career she wrote challengingly and combatively about the need for gender equality. In her youth she was an ardent admirer of the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose controversial book  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) emphasized the ways in which middle-class women were denied any proper education and were therefore made unfit for meaningful roles in society. It was a book which Barrett Browning believed should be read repeatedly because of its strong call for change. Certainly, she made sure that she educated herself to the highest levels through extensive reading in history, literature, the classics (particularly Greek), and a range of modern foreign languages.

Barrett Browning also believed that this educational training was crucial to her aim to be recognised as a successful poet. This was particularly so given that the dominant conservative culture of the time believed that poetry was principally the literary terrain of men. If women were to write poetry, they should write about love, nature or pious religion – that is, nothing that was perceived as too intellectually demanding. From the start, however, Barrett Browning sought not only to assert her right to be a poet, but to be a poet who dealt with key social and political issues of the day: war, nationalism, industrialisation, slavery, religious controversy, the manipulation of power, and the fight for liberty on numerous fronts. There was little conforming to conservative expectations here.

Oppression and celebration: themes in barrett browning’s poetry.

By the late 1830s, Barrett Browning was starting to explore her concern with the social roles prescribed for women much more critically through her poetry. In particular, she was increasingly interested in the power dynamics that lie at the heart of heterosexual relationships. In a series of ballads composed in the 1830s and early 1840s, for example – poems such as ‘The Romaunt of Margret’, ‘A Romance of the Ganges’, ‘The Romance of the Swan’s Nest’ and ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ – Barrett Browning repeatedly criticises women’s secondary role in society, the ways in which the institution of marriage oppresses them, and the idea that love and sexual relations are often grounded in problematic and often brutal power games. Betrayal, duplicity and loss are dominant themes in these poems, which often see the women silenced or dead at the end. Conventional society’s expectations are entrapping and potentially deadly.

By the 1840s, however, Barrett Browning was also starting to celebrate particularly strong women in her work. In ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, for example, published in  Poems  (1844), she depicts Geraldine as a woman who rejects the image of female passivity embodied in the statue of Silence in the woods on her estate. Instead, Geraldine asserts independence and agency as she initiates a cross-class relationship with the poet Bertram. Also contained in  Poems  are the two sonnets ‘To George Sand: A Desire’ and ‘To George Sand: A Recognition’. These were written for the French novelist Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin who published under the pseudonym of George Sand. A highly controversial figure who frequently dressed in traditionally masculine attire, Sand produced novels which openly questioned the systematic oppression of women, sexual hypocrisy and established religion. For Barrett Browning, Sand represented a positive model of ‘True genius, but true woman’ (‘A Recognition’, l. 1).

Aurora Leigh

Barrett Browning brought together these interests in various aspects of the Woman Question in her major poem,  Aurora Leigh , published in 1856. Her longest work, which is written as a nine-book epic, it traces Aurora’s struggles to establish herself as a professional woman poet. It is also, as Barrett Browning wrote in the Dedication, ‘the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’. In the first book of the poem, Barrett Browning returns to the issue of women’s education as Aurora’s aunt subjects her to an ‘education’ system which threats to eradicate both her enquiring mind and her individuality. She is made to read conduct books on how to be a good woman, learn lists of useless facts, and perform obtuse tasks like spinning glass and modelling flowers in wax (Book 1, ll. 399-426). It is only when Aurora discovers her father’s library, with its extensive range of ideas and knowledge, that she feels her world and mind opening up, imaged here in terms of volcanic eruption:

As the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart […] – thus, my soul […] Let go conventions and sprang up surprised (Book 1, ll. 845–52)

As the poem demonstrates, this is a far more meaningful education for Aurora – one which transcends traditional middle-class women’s education and which offers more than just a training for marriage.

This independence of thought is linked to Aurora’s commitment to being recognised as a professional poet. During the 1850s, when  Aurora Leigh  was published, the question of meaningful work for women was central to many early women’s rights movements such as the Langham Place Group. Barrett Browning’s poem locks into this contemporary debate as Aurora asserts her right to work and be independent rather than accept her cousin Romney’s half-hearted marriage proposal. As she tells Romney, poetry has the power to transform opinions and bring about social change, and is ‘“most necessary work/ As any of the economists”’ (Book 2, ll. 459–60). Moreover, this is work which she believes women can do just as well as men. The poem follows Aurora from her lowly position in a London garret where she writes to make ends meet, to her position as successful and highly-regarded poet living in Italy – making  Aurora Leigh  a case study in women’s right to work and a celebration of women’s achievements.

One other major area makes  Aurora Leigh  an important text in relation to the Woman Question: the narrative of the working-class figure Marian Earle. Marian is abused by her family and subsequently, through a series of plot turns, she is sold into a brothel. When Aurora meets her in Paris, Marian is living in a slum as a single mother. In conservative Victorian thinking, Marian is now a ‘fallen woman’, beyond the pale of society even through her baby is a result of Marian’s being raped – ‘man’s violence,/ Not man’s seduction, made me what I am’, Marian explains (Book 6, ll. 1126–7). On hearing this story, Aurora rejects conventional judgements and takes Marian with her to live in Florence. She therefore shows support for the woman that conservative society condemns and boldly asserts that Marian is morally pure rather than morally tainted.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry therefore shows her to be acutely alert to many of the key concerns of the Victorian Woman Question. Her works engage forcefully with issues of education, marriage, work, sexuality, motherhood, female solidarity and the need for gender equality. It was the power of these writings – and  Aurora Leigh  in particular – which would have such an influence on subsequent poets like Christina Rossetti, Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew as they continued to interrogate women’s position in society to the end of the century and beyond.

Written by Dr. Simon Avery ,  Reader in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Westminster. His publications include Elizabeth Barrett Browning  (2011),  Mary Coleridge: Selected Poems  (2010),  Thomas Hardy: A Reader’s Guide  (2009) and the Broadview edition of Hardy’s  The Return of the Native (2013). He is currently working on a study of modernity and place in the late-Victorian period and various projects concerning the history of Queer London.

Victorian Poetry and Poetics Copyright © 2024 by Monica Smith Hart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Victorian Period

27 important questions on the victorian period, when was the victorian period, when was victoria's reign, what was the victorian period like.

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Write short notes on Victorian poetry : Essay Summary (PDF)

Victorian poetry .

Victorian poetry victorian poetry pdf

Ans.  Victorian poetry contributed a lot to the development of English poetry.  It started in the second quarter of the 19th century (1832) and ended by 1901.  The poets of this period were close to life, surrounding and situations. Victorian poetry

Victorian poetry pdf

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ELord Alfred Tennyson was the most representative poet of the victorian age.  His poetry was a record of the intellectual and spiritual life of the time.  Being a careful observer of science and philosophy, he was deeply impressed by the discoveries and speculations there lies the conflict between science and religion, doubt and faith, materialism and spirituality in his poetry.

In Memoriam ‘we find a great conflict between faith and doubt Tennyson was essentially the poet of law and order as well as of progress.  The worrying stanzas of In Memoriam ‘are interesting and full of imagination.  Tennyson was an extremely emotional poet and was a great admirer of the English tradition.

  Among other important poems of Tennyson are, The Princess ‘,’ Tears Idle tears.  The Gardener ‘s Daughter, Bugle song’, ‘Sweet and Low’, ‘English Idylls,’ ‘Dora’, ‘Ulysses’, ‘Locksley Hall’, ‘Sir Galahad’, ‘The Brook’, ‘ The Charge of the Light Brigade ‘, ” Wages ‘ and ‘ The Higher pantheism and others.

Robert Brewing was also a leading poet of his age. He believed in the individual will and subordination. There is robust idealism reflected in his poetry, His boundless energy, his cheerful! courage, his faith in life and the development give a strange vitality of his poetry.

Victorian age of poetry

He had a firm belief in the immortality of the soul which formed the basis of his generous optimism Among his important poems, ‘ Dramatic Lyrics ‘, ‘ DramaticRomances and Lyrics ‘, ‘ Man and woman ‘, ‘ Pippa passes ‘, ‘ My Star ‘, ‘ Home Thoughts from Abroad ‘, ” Meeting at Night ‘, ‘ By the Fireside ‘, ‘ Pied pipes ‘, ‘ The Ring and the Book ”  are of high orders.

Victorian poetry characteristics

MathewAmold was also a great poet of the period. He was a true observer of mankind and he reached the ornate style. Most of his poems give expression to the conflict of the age between spontaneity and discipline. emotion and reason, faith and skepticism. As a matter of fact. Arnold longed for primitive faith, wholeness, simplicity, and happiness.

Even in his nature poems, he looks upon nature as a comic force. In his most famous poems. ‘ Empedocles on Etna ‘. Arnold deals with the life of a philosopher. Elizabeth Barret Browing was a leading poet of her period and her poetry reflects the social and political problems of the early victorian ora.

Victorian poetry notes

Among her important poems, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Casaguidi windows, ‘ are of a high order. Edward Fitzgerald was leading poet of the period, Among his important poetic creations, ‘ Rubaiyat of Oman Khayyam ‘ was of a high order. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also a famous poet of this period: Among his important poems, ‘ Ballads and Sonnets ‘ is of high understanding.

William Morris was also a great poet during the Victorian age. Among his important poems. ‘ Badlands and sonnets ‘ is of high importance. Swinburne . was the last poet of the period who expressed the thoughts and ideology of his time.

Victorian poetry is were rich in expressing moral purpose idealism and the great philosophy of its time. Victorian poetry

Write short note on Victorian poetry 

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Please note that some of the sample questions below might seem a bit more specific than is typical on a “general knowledge” exam because they are keyed to graduate seminars taught during the academic year. The students taking the exam had enrolled in these seminars.

• What constitutes a strong woman in Middle English literature? Use at least three different authors when constructing your discussion, with a couple of contrasting examples by one or two of the authors.
• Discuss the relationships of audience to author in medieval literature. Several of the most intricately crafted poems of British literature come from the 14th century (e.g., Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Cotton manuscript), with marginal markers of various kinds to assist individual readers, all of which suggests that the writers are consciously concerned with the potentialities of a new, literate and well educated audience for vernacular literature. On the other hand, the literature is highly concerned with aurality and subtle voicing. One approach to these issues might be to begin your discussion with ideas of reading as a performative craft, whether the reading occurs primarily through the eyes or through the ears, with intellect and memory as the essential staging areas.
• Issues of ethics in medieval literature usually focus on matters of the will—choice, motive, and intention. Using the N-Town play “The Woman Taken in Adultery” as your starting point, discuss the medieval aptitude for moral literature, with a refined sense of interface between the high-minded and the comic.

English Renaissance

• Select three plays from the reading list you have studied. Consider what you know more generally about Renaissance practices surrounding death and Renaissance literary depictions of death. How does your understanding of death in Renaissance society, culture, and/or literature help you to interpret the significance of death in each of these three plays? Please remember that the question focuses on interpretation . In other words, be sure to explain precisely why or how the scenes of death or references to death matter in your understanding of these three plays.
• Select, from the list you studied, three works (plays, poems or prose) that depict women who are verbally powerful (for instance, as writers, speech-makers, persuaders, cursers, gossipers). Describe with precision the nature of their verbal power and then explain how each of these works relies, presumably in quite different ways, on the figure of the verbally powerful woman. This too is a question that focuses on interpretation. For example, how does each author use the verbally powerful woman to—and these are just "for instances" and not meant to be prescriptive or to set limitations—establish their work's tragic or comic paradigms; examine the distinction between and overlapping of public and private spheres; sort through acceptable and/or effective versions of rhetoric, style, or authorship; mark or navigate through competing Renaissance authority relations?
• Select three sonnets (representing work by at least two authors) from the list you studied. How does each sonnet convey meaning by relying on the audience's knowledge of the formal and thematic traits associated with the English or Italian sonnet? Again, this is a questions that focuses on interpretation . You will need to produce three careful close readings that explain precisely how each poem is trying to engage its audience.
• An overarching concern of much of eighteenth-century literature is the problem of how to read the body. The Country Wife is about a notorious rake whose challenge is to feign impotence to other men while making women understand that he is still very much – indeed, now more than ever—open for business. Swift’s Lady’s Dressing Room seeks to “expose” the armory of powders, paints, and pomades that women use to dissimulate the “reality” of their bodies. Likewise, Tristram Shandy evinces an obsession with gesture and posture—the doffing of a hat, the flourish of a walking stick, the angle of the orating body. Persuasion thematizes the challenges of discerning thoughts and feelings on the surfaces of the body when social circumstances render point-blank verbal declarations either improper or impossible. What forms does the eighteenth century’s investment in body-reading take, what significances does it seem to have (what “other” problems might it seem to stand for?), and how does it change over time or across different texts? Your discussion may focus on the works named above, or you may choose other examples; either way, your answer should engage with at least two different genres.
• The eighteenth-century novel has traditionally been studied separately from drama or poetry. Years’ worth of syllabi and conference-panel topics have cemented this division. As a result, the “uniqueness” of the Novel has perhaps been overemphasized: the Novel is “modern,” is “realistic,” is interested in “subjectivity,” in a way that other literature from the period is “not.” What would be the effects, contrastingly, of considering the eighteenth-century novel in the context of Augustan satire and/or Restoration drama? What insights into Pamela, Tom Jones, or Tristram Shandy, for example, might be gained by discussing them in light of the stylistic, thematic, and epistemological concerns of poetry and the theatre? Frame your answer in relation to one to two novels and one to two non-novels.

British Romantic Writing

• Literary-histories of romanticism tend to posit a shift, at the end of the eighteenth century, from “mimetic” to “expressive” models of poetry: the aim of literature was no longer to offer a “reflection” of the external world, but rather to provide a “revelation of personality.” In terms of genre, satire gave way to lyric; in terms of epistemological paradigms, empiricism gave way to psychology. But of course, the romantic poets are also famous for their interest in nature, and the power of many of their poems hinges upon a striking use of visual detail (think of Wordsworth’s description of daffodils, Shelley’s meditation on Mont Blanc, Keats’ ode to Autumn). How does romantic poetry bridge both inner and outer, mind and matter? How did the romantics reconcile their particularized attention to the natural world with their commitment to exploring memory, emotion, and the unconscious? Refer to several texts in your response.
• Many definitions of romanticism highlight the romantics’ intense privileging of the individual and individualism – their interest in how the poet becomes a poet (Wordsworth’s Prelude); their focus on the passionate rebel-hero, pitted against a small-minded and restrictive society from which he chooses to exile himself (Byron’s Childe Harold). Yet it is well known that these authors often collaborated, and consciously cultivated literary coteries: The Prelude was originally intended as part of a longer, epic poem called The Recluse, which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned to write together; according to Wordsworth, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was inspired by a conversation the two poets had about a book Wordsworth was reading; and according to Shelley, it was with Shelley’s support and encouragement that Byron wrote Don Juan. Certainly, even without reference to particular biographical details, we can find in these authors’ poetry a multiplicity of overlapping concerns, motifs, settings, and characters. In a consideration of several texts, discuss the interaction of solitariness and sociability in romantic literature. In what ways do you see the two values in conflict? In what ways might they be seen to blend?
• Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present both fault Victorians for idolizing the value of personal liberty. In your essay, discuss the problems Arnold and Carlyle perceive within a society of increasing democratization, industrialization, and capitalism. What remedies do they propose?
• Drawing on at least three different authors from your reading list, discuss how the novels/poems composed by these writers offer a critique of Victorian gender norms.
• John Stuart Mill once famously described the Victorian period as an “age of transition.” In your essay, discuss how either George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch depict a society grappling with transition.
• How does Emerson's notion of self-reliance reflect a specific social orientation that is not easily applied to all people living in 19th-century America? Use at least three texts on your list to suggest the limitations of his universal claims.
• Compare Bartleby's infamous "I would prefer not to" to the type of resistance advocated by Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience." How do these differing approaches conceptualize human freedom, individuality and social change among other major 19th-century concerns? Supplement your response with at least one other text to argue for how American writers of this era understood the limits and possibilities of resistance.
• W. E. B. DuBois famously said that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line, but in many nineteenth-century works of literature the color line shows itself already to be an issue. Chose two works from early in the century and two from late and discuss the ways in which they reflect, interrogate, or critique the problem of race. Use specific examples from the works in developing your answer.
• Emerson has often been cited as the dominant influence on American writers at mid-century. Specify how Emerson may have influenced three writers from the following list: Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Dickenson, Whitman, Fuller, Stowe. Remember, a given writer might manifest Emerson’s influence by resisting or even rejecting it. Be as precise as possible.
• Why, after nearly 100 years, does The Wasteland continue to play such a prominent role in the stories we tell about twentieth-century American poetry? Describe the relationship of three different poets (i.e., Williams, Crane, Lowell, Bishop, Oppen, etc.) to Eliot’s paradigm-shifting poem.
• People often speak of the “meta-fictional” nature of post-modern fiction writing, but the impulse is in many ways as old as the impulse to create fictions; think of Cervantes. Describe the ways in which three modern American novels (i.e., Faulkner, James, Hurston, Cather, Wharton, etc.) are themselves about novel-making or embody the impulse of novel-making in the formal procedures.
• One of the common claims about modern and postmodern fiction is that it is intensely selfreflexive—that it is writing about the subject of writing. In some cases, this takes the form of foregrounding the process by which the text we read is constructed—whether as a written text or an act of storytelling. Often, how the story is told (or written) becomes more important than what the story tells. Put another way, one could argue that many works of twentieth century British fiction are centrally concerned with the question of fiction-making, and these texts often focus on the permeable boundaries between the fictional and the real. Looking closely at three to four novels from the period, discuss their treatment of the process of writing, storytelling, or fiction-making.
• It has often been argued that World War I effected a decisive shift in modern consciousness, necessitating new literary forms to meet a radically changed understanding of the world. More recently, however, critics have suggested that the “the rupture of 1914-18 was much less complete than previous scholars have suggested.” Jay Winter, for example, has argued that “The overlap of languages and approaches between the old and the new, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern,’ the conservative and the iconoclastic, was apparent both during and after the war. The ongoing dialogue and exchange among artists and their public, between those who selfconsciously returned to nineteenth-century forms and themes and those who sought to supersede them, makes the history of modernism more complicated than a simple, linear divide between ‘old’ and ‘new’ might suggest.” Looking at four twentieth-century works from your list, discuss the extent to which you see the Great War as effecting a decisive break in aesthetic practice. How do you understand the history of modernism in terms of the “old” and the “new”?

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50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET / SET Prepration

Table of Contents

1. Who is considered the leading figure of American literature during the Victorian Age? a) Edgar Allan Poe b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Walt Whitman d) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

2. Which novel by Herman Melville, published in 1851, is considered one of the greatest American novels of all time? a) “Moby-Dick” b) “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” c) “The Scarlet Letter” d) “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

3. Who wrote the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which played a significant role in shaping public opinion about slavery before the Civil War? a) Harriet Beecher Stowe b) Louisa May Alcott c) Emily Dickinson d) Margaret Fuller

4. Which American writer was known for his transcendentalist beliefs and his essay “Self-Reliance”? a) Ralph Waldo Emerson b) Henry David Thoreau c) James Fenimore Cooper d) Washington Irving

5. Emily Dickinson, a prominent poet of the Victorian Age, was known for her unique style characterized by: a) Lengthy epic poems b) Stream-of-consciousness writing c) Use of slant rhyme and dashes d) Formal and structured verse

6. Which novel by Louisa May Alcott follows the lives of the four March sisters and is considered a classic of American literature? a) “Little Women” b) “Jane Eyre” 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET c) “Wuthering Heights” d) “Pride and Prejudice”

7. Who wrote the novel “The House of the Seven Gables,” exploring themes of guilt, redemption, and the supernatural? a) Nathaniel Hawthorne b) Henry James c) Mark Twain d) Edgar Allan Poe

8. Which writer is best known for his collection of short stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”? a) Edgar Allan Poe b) Herman Melville c) Nathaniel Hawthorne d) Mark Twain

9. Which American writer was known for his regionalist and realist novels depicting life in the South, such as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”? a) Mark Twain b) Henry James c) Kate Chopin d) Harriet Beecher Stowe

10. Who wrote the novel “The Portrait of a Lady,” exploring themes of independence and the role of women in society? a) Henry James b) Edith Wharton c) Kate Chopin d) Louisa May Alcott

11. Which American writer is best known for his frontier tales, including “The Last of the Mohicans” and “The Leatherstocking Tales” series? a) James Fenimore Cooper b) Washington Irving c) Edgar Allan Poe d) Ralph Waldo Emerson

12. Which writer is best known for his poetry collections such as “Leaves of Grass,” which celebrated the human body and the American spirit? a) Walt Whitman b) Emily Dickinson c) Edgar Allan Poe d) Robert Frost

13. Who wrote the novel “The Red Badge of Courage,” depicting the experiences of a young soldier in the American Civil War? a) Stephen Crane b) Walt Whitman c) Henry James d) Herman Melville

14. Which American writer explored themes of feminism and women’s rights in her novel “The Awakening”? a) Kate Chopin 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET b) Harriet Beecher Stowe c) Edith Wharton d) Louisa May Alcott

15. Which writer is best known for his gothic horror tales, including “The Raven” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”? a) Edgar Allan Poe b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Herman Melville d) Henry James

16. Who wrote the novel “The Scarlet Letter,” exploring themes of sin, guilt, and redemption in Puritan society? a) Nathaniel Hawthorne b) Washington Irving c) Henry David Thoreau d) Ralph Waldo Emerson

• 50+ MCQs on Washington Irving with Answers for UGC NET / SET Prepration
• 50+ MCQs on Walt Whitman with Answers for UGC NET / SET Prepration
• 50+ MCQs on Ralph Waldo Emerson with Answers for UGC NET / SET Prepration

17. Which writer is best known for his satirical novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” often considered one of the greatest American novels? a) Mark Twain b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Henry James d) Edgar Allan Poe

18. Which American writer is known for her novels exploring the lives of wealthy New York families, such as “The Age of Innocence”? a) Edith Wharton b) Louisa May Alcott c) Emily Dickinson d) Kate Chopin

19. Who wrote the poem “Song of Myself,” celebrating the individual and the diversity of American culture? a) Walt Whitman b) Emily Dickinson c) Robert Frost d) Edgar Allan Poe

20. Which American writer is best known for his detective fiction, including stories featuring the character C. Auguste Dupin? a) Edgar Allan Poe b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Herman Melville d) Washington Irving

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21. Which writer is best known for her novel “Little Men,” a sequel to “Little Women”? a) Louisa May Alcott b) Harriet Beecher Stowe c) Kate Chopin d) Edith Wharton 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET

22. Who wrote the poem “Because I could not stop for Death,” exploring themes of mortality and the afterlife? a) Emily Dickinson b) Walt Whitman c) Robert Frost d) Edgar Allan Poe

23. Which American writer explored themes of isolation and the struggle for individuality in his novel “Bartleby, the Scrivener”? a) Herman Melville b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Henry James d) Mark Twain

24. Who wrote the novel “Ethan Frome,” depicting the tragic consequences of forbidden love in a small New England town? a) Edith Wharton b) Kate Chopin c) Henry James d) Nathaniel Hawthorne

25. Which writer is known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which critiques the treatment of women’s mental health in the Victorian era? a) Charlotte Perkins Gilman b) Harriet Beecher Stowe c) Louisa May Alcott d) Edith Wharton

26. Who wrote the novel “The Turn of the Screw,” a ghost story set in an English country house? a) Henry James b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Edith Wharton d) Mark Twain

27. Which American writer is known for his philosophical essays and lectures, including “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”? a) Ralph Waldo Emerson b) Walt Whitman c) Henry David Thoreau d) Edgar Allan Poe

28. Who wrote the novel “Benito Cereno,” exploring themes of slavery and the nature of evil? a) Herman Melville b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Mark Twain d) Henry James 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET

29. Which writer is best known for his humorous tales of the American West, including “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”? a) Mark Twain b) Edgar Allan Poe c) Nathaniel Hawthorne d) Washington Irving

30. Who wrote the novel “Washington Square,” exploring themes of social class and family expectations in 19th-century New York? a) Henry James b) Edith Wharton c) Louisa May Alcott d) Harriet Beecher Stowe

31. Which American writer is known for his sea adventures, including “Typee” and “Omoo”? a) Herman Melville b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Washington Irving d) Edgar Allan Poe

32. Who wrote the novel “The Marble Faun,” exploring themes of sin and redemption in Renaissance Italy? a) Nathaniel Hawthorne b) Henry James c) Edith Wharton d) Louisa May Alcott

33. Which writer is best known for his realist novel “Sister Carrie,” depicting a young woman’s rise in Chicago society? a) Theodore Dreiser b) Edith Wharton c) Henry James d) Kate Chopin

34. Who wrote the novel “The Minister’s Black Veil,” exploring themes of guilt and hypocrisy in Puritan New England? a) Nathaniel Hawthorne b) Edgar Allan Poe c) Herman Melville d) Washington Irving

35. Which American writer is known for his novel “ The Princess Casamassima ,” exploring themes of social unrest and political radicalism? a) Henry James b) Edith Wharton c) Nathaniel Hawthorne d) Mark Twain

36. Who wrote the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln? a) Walt Whitman b) Emily Dickinson c) Robert Frost d) Edgar Allan Poe

37. Which writer is best known for his satirical novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”? a) Mark Twain b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Henry James d) Edgar Allan Poe

38. Who wrote the novel “The Bostonians,” exploring themes of feminism and the women’s suffrage movement? a) Henry James 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET b) Edith Wharton c) Louisa May Alcott d) Harriet Beecher Stowe

39. Which American writer is known for his philosophical novel “Walden,” based on his experiences living in a cabin in the woods? a) Henry David Thoreau b) Ralph Waldo Emerson c) Walt Whitman d) Edgar Allan Poe

40. Who wrote the poem “The Road Not Taken,” exploring themes of choices and consequences? a) Robert Frost b) Emily Dickinson c) Walt Whitman d) Edgar Allan Poe

41. Which writer is best known for his novel “The Portrait of a Lady,” exploring themes of independence and the role of women in society? a) Henry James b) Edith Wharton c) Kate Chopin d) Louisa May Alcott

42. Who wrote the novel “Daisy Miller,” exploring themes of innocence and cultural differences between America and Europe? a) Henry James b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Herman Melville d) Mark Twain

43. Which American writer is known for his humorous tales of small-town life, including “Life on the Mississippi”? a) Mark Twain b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Washington Irving d) Edgar Allan Poe

44. Who wrote the poem “I Hear America Singing,” celebrating the diversity and vitality of American workers? a) Walt Whitman b) Emily Dickinson c) Robert Frost d) Edgar Allan Poe

45. Which writer is best known for his realist novel “An American Tragedy,” based on a true crime case? a) Theodore Dreiser b) Edith Wharton c) Henry James d) Kate Chopin

46. Who wrote the poem “The Raven,” a narrative poem known for its haunting refrain? a) Edgar Allan Poe b) Nathaniel Hawthorne c) Herman Melville d) Washington Irving

47. Which American writer is known for his novel “The House of Mirth,” exploring themes of social class and morality in New York society? a) Edith Wharton 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET b) Louisa May Alcott c) Harriet Beecher Stowe d) Henry James

48. Who wrote the novel “My Ántonia,” exploring themes of immigration and the American frontier? a) Willa Cather b) Edith Wharton c) Henry James 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET d) Kate Chopin

49. Which writer is best known for his humorous tales of the Mississippi River, including “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”? 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET a) Mark Twain b) Nathaniel Hawthorne 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET c) Henry James d) Edgar Allan Poe 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET

50. Who wrote the novel “The Awakening,” exploring themes of female independence and sexual desire? a) Kate Chopin b) Harriet Beecher Stowe c) Louisa May Alcott d) Edith Wharton

1. b) Nathaniel Hawthorne 2. a) “Moby-Dick” 3. a) Harriet Beecher Stowe 4. a) Ralph Waldo Emerson 5. c) Use of slant rhyme and dashes 6. a) “Little Women” 7. a) Nathaniel Hawthorne 8. a) Edgar Allan Poe 9. a) Mark Twain 10. a) Henry James 11. a) James Fenimore Cooper 12. a) Walt Whitman 13. a) Stephen Crane 14. a) Kate Chopin 15. a) Edgar Allan Poe 16. a) Nathaniel Hawthorne 17. a) Mark Twain 18. a) Edith Wharton 19. a) Walt Whitman 20. a) Edgar Allan Poe 21. a) Louisa May Alcott 22. a) Emily Dickinson 23. a) Herman Melville 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET 24. a) Edith Wharton 25. a) Charlotte Perkins Gilman 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET 26. a) Henry James 27. a) Ralph Waldo Emerson 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET 28. a) Herman Melville 29. a) Mark Twain 50+ MCQs on Victorian Age with Answers for UGC NET 30. a) Henry James 31. a) Herman Melville 32. a) Nathaniel Hawthorne 33. a) Theodore Dreiser 34. a) Nathaniel Hawthorne 35. a) Henry James

36. a) Walt Whitman 37. a) Mark Twain 38. a) Henry James 39. a) Henry David Thoreau 40. a) Robert Frost 41. a) Henry James 42. a) Henry James 43. a) Mark Twain 44. a) Walt Whitman 45. a) Theodore Dreiser 46. a) Edgar Allan Poe 47. a) Edith Wharton 48. a) Willa Cather 49. a) Mark Twain 50. a) Kate Chopin

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