HILARY FRASERVictorian poetry and historicism
i"A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community,"
announced Thomas Love Peacock in his satirically anti-Romantic essay
"The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820), 1 an essay whose vocabulary anticipates
Matthew Arnold in the 1860s but which in fact takes a position quite
antithetical to that of the later apostle of Culture and Hellenism. "He lives
in the days that are past," writes Peacock. "The march of his intellect is
like that of a crab, backward" (21-22). Mischievously appropriating the
standard historicist idea of the four ages that originally derives from the
Greek poet Hesiod (8th century BC) who charts the decline of a golden
age in Works and Days. Peacock derisively consigns modern poetry to the
age of brass. He claims that the poets of his own time "wallow ... in the
rubbish of departed ignorance," parasitically weaving "disjointed relics of
tradition and fragments of second hand observation" into "a modern-
antique compound of frippery and barbarism, in which the puling
sentimentality of the present time is grafted on the misrepresented rugged-
ness of the past into a heterogeneous congeries of unamalgamating
manners" (19-20). Peacock exhorts the modern reader to eschew such
"artificial reconstructions of a few morbid ascetics in unpoetical times"
(18) in favor of the genuine item, and thus "that egregious confraternity
of rhymesters, known by the name of the Lake Poets" (18) is peremptorily
dismissed.
Peacock's early-nineteenth-century view of the brassy attempts of modern
poetry to emulate the golden age of literature underlines the obvious point
that the Victorians were by no means the first to turn to the past for a kind
of poetic authenticity felt to be lacking in the present time. Yet, as the
nineteenth century wore on, that precious commodity poetry was to
become more tarnished still by its persistent traffic in history. The use of the
past was to grow both more self-consciously theorized and more diverse in
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