A History of English Literature

Overview

This survey of Victorian poetry to 1880 restricts itself to the major figures listed

below, ignoring considerable minor poets such as Emily Brontë, William Barnes,

Edward Fitzgerald, William Morris, George Meredith, Coventry Patmore and C. S.

Calverley. The copious variety of Victorian verse is well sampled in the anthologies

which are listed in ‘Further reading’ (p. 284). Although Victorian verse is broadly

post-Romantic, giving new inflections to the personal, subjective, emotional and

idealistic impulses of the Romantics, it is more various than this suggests.

Expressive and plangent, it is also descriptive, of nature and of domestic and

urban life. Often it half-dramatizes figures from history, legend and literature.

Browning, Clough and Hopkins suggest an idiosyncrasy of subject, language and

metre which is equally noticeable in lesser poets.

nVictorian Romantic poetry

Minor verse

John Clare

Of minor verse between Byron and Tennyson, we admire the best of Walter Savage
Landor, George Darley and Thomas Lovell Beddoes and may respond to the senti-
mental lyrics of Tom Moore and Mrs Felicia Hemans, but the poetry ofJohn Clare
(1793–1864) has value as a whole. His Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery
(1820) and later volumes are a faithful account of the old rural life. Clare, a farm
labourer, describes in a simpler voice than Crabbe and in more detail than
Wordsworth: ‘I peeled bits of straw and I got switches too.’ His innocence is seen in
‘I Am’. Unsettled by a move from his native village in Northamptonshire, Clare spent
decades in asylums.
If Wordsworth clothed Nature with piety and philosophy, the things described by
his successors are more actually present to imagined sight and touch than those in
his own recollections. Natural detail comes to have an authenticating role in many

Contents

Victorian Romantic

poetry 273

Minor verse 273

John Clare 273

Alfred Tennyson

Elizabeth Barrett and

Robert Browning 277

Matthew Arnold 278

Arthur Hugh Clough 280

Dante Gabriel and

Christina Rossetti 280

Algernon Charles

Swinburne 281

Gerard Hopkins 282

Further reading 284

Poets

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

(1809–1892)

Elizabeth Barrett (1806–1861)

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

Arthur Hugh Clough

(1819–1861)

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(1828–1882)

Christina Rossetti

(1830–1894)

Algernon Charles Swinburne

(1837–1909)

Fr Gerard Hopkins

(1844–1889)

273

Poetr y

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