The critical fortunes of Victorian poetryend of Tennyson's poem, may be an obtuse reader of the text that is the
Lady. Yet that text is able to appeal to his private sensibilities - the
appreciation of beauty, the ability to empathize, to desire. "She has a lovely
face" may be an inadequate response to the Lady but it is not, for example,
as inadequate as "Can I watch the autopsy?" or "Do you think I could have
the boat after we bury her?" The notion that the Lady has something to
offer the people of Camelot as a group, the way in which her mysterious-
ness to them links together the various elements of this society so that they
are identifiable as a group with some commonality, is part of the way in
which poetry represents but also helps to construct the social.
Both poetry and society, then, were ideas under construction during the
nineteenth century. The problem of what the relationship between them
should be is thus a particularly modern problem. In other words, it is a
problem that emerges during the centuries in which bourgeois capitalism
restructures social and political life in such a manner that art and society
appear related and yet somehow unrelated kinds of things. To the moder-
nists, it looked as if the Victorians were merely the producers of a bad
solution to this problem: like the Lady, they seemed both to care too much
about social intervention and to withdraw too much from the world. As
Raymond Macdonald Alden, author of Alfred Tennyson, How to Know
Him (1917), observes: "it sometimes seems to us as if the Victorians
represented that uninteresting state of mankind before the fall, whereas we
have eaten of the tree of knowledge." 8 At this time, Victorian poetry felt
both out of touch with life's gritty realities and excessively topical and
didactic.
The tendency to characterize Victorian poetry as too involved in
Victorian society or too isolated from it began to shift after the Second
World War when the question of art's relation to the social acquired new
urgency in an era of cultural and economic reconstruction. Three important
studies - Graham Hough's The Last Romantics (1947), John Heath-
Stubbs's The Darkling Plain (1950), and E.D.H. Johnson's The Alien
Vision of Victorian Poetry (1952) - argued for the continuing relevance of
Victorian poetry in a world torn apart by the ravages of war. Hough and
Heath-Stubbs reevaluated the later Victorian poets like Algernon Charles
Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as the precursors of the modernists,
carving out a space for art in a hostile culture made more hostile by science.
For Hough the poets usually seen as escapist were not just retreating from
society but trying to create an alternative to it: a project for which there
was even more necessity in a world in which modern science had produced
nuclear bombs. Similarly, Heath-Stubbs values later Victorian poetry and
its gesture of withdrawal as a response to the materialism of Victorian