Victorian Poetry

KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES

'The Lady of Shalott" and the critical

fortunes of Victorian poetry

Introduction

The standard story about the critical fortunes of Victorian poetry in the
twentieth century goes like this. During the early part of the century,
particularly after 1914, modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf
defined themselves against the Victorians, whom they saw as old-fashioned,
somewhat hypocritical, and not particularly good writers. Eliot compared
Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning unfavorably to the seventeenth-
century poet John Donne, arguing that the former "are poets, and they
think; but they do not feel their thought... as immediately as the odor of a
rose ... A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensi-
bility." 1 In A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf quoted love lyrics from
Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to invoke "some feeling that one used to
have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps)," and believed this
poetry was inspired by an "illusion." "Why," she asked, "not praise the
catastrophe... that destroyed the illusion and put truth in its place?" 2
"The Angel in the House," the title of Coventry Patmore's famous mid-
Victorian poem, became for Woolf the name for an oppressive Victorian
model of femininity that modernist women writers needed to discard in
order to write freely. 3

Although the study of English Literature in schools and universities has
its roots in the Victorian period (when it served as an alternative to the
classics in the education of women, working-class men, and colonial
administrators), it was in the 1920s and 1930s that literary criticism
emerged as a professional scholarly discipline worthy of the attention of
elite men. 4 As literary scholars both in the United Kingdom (LA. Richards,
F.R. Leavis) and the United States (Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks)
developed a mode of literary criticism that valued poems as self-contained
artifacts (the New Criticism), Victorian poetry became almost synonymous
with bad poetry. In part, this orthodoxy arose because both high mod-

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