1

Lecture 5: Module Three: Victorian Poetry (I) Lord Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold the

Paramount Early and Mid-Victorian Post-Romantic Voices (Contributions I, 40-50 and 54-55);
(Contributions II, 9-14 and 39-41)
I Introduction: predominant themes as the basis for II: Tennyson and Arnold compared as Paramount
Poets III Conclusion: The taste, titles and critical labels of Victorian poetry to be remembered
I Predominant Themes in Early and Mid-Victorian Poetry1:
After the themes presented in Tennysons The Princess (see the Prologue), leisure, pleasure and noble
lineage can be seen developed in post-romantic idyllic poetry about the national past; poems are cast in
the legendary Arthurian shape (The Lady of Shalott and the cycle Idylls of the King nicknamed Idylls
of the Prince, because they were composed to commemorate Prince Albert, Victorias husband, after his
death in 1869 because by this time Tennyson had been lorded and made Poet Laureate in 1850 and
the Royal Pairs friend); Tennyson also revives classical Greek heroes, motifs, examples to write
dramatic monologues or fables: Ulysses (a dramatic monologue), The Lotos Eaters (a fable which

To be compared with slightly later Victorian themes: poems that exalted domestic women
or debated fashionable ideas in dramatic monologues. For the latter category, see Robert
Brownings Fra Lippo Lippi and Caliban Upon Setebos and for the latter category,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh(1864) and Coventry Patmores The Angel in the

your gentle self,

my Wife, And love, that grows from one to all. Yet is it now my
chosen task/ To sing her worth as Maid and Wife;. There follows a long
list of virtues derived from the fairest even in her fair heart ( So may my happy
skill disclose/ New fairness even in her fair heart); that the angel in the
House (1854/1862), a paragon of desirable femininity dedicated to

house possessed: gentleness announced by a smiling face; the pairing of love and duty,
lacking pride, readiness to please (cf. the Preludes, to Part I, the third one, titled Love and

Anne lived so truly from above,/ She was so gentle and so

good,/That duty bade me fall in love; and the third one titled A Distinction
The lack of lovely pride, in her/ Who strives to please, my pleasure
numbs,/And still the maid I most prefer/ Whose care to please with
pleasing comes. eagerness for amity the womans eagerness / For
amity full-signd and seald ; benign and honourable, meaning womanly And
yet to see her so benign,/ So honourable and womanly,/In every
maiden kindness mine,/ And full of gayest courtesy,/Was pleasure
so without alloy,/ Such unreproved, sufficient bliss, ; co-equal in wisdom,
woman and man: Amidst the presence of the Lord/
Co-equal Wisdom
laughs and plays. / Female and male God made the man;/ His
image is the whole, not half;
Duty:

2
expresses, by an analogy, the modern self-indulging state of prostration) Tithonus (a fable of human
finitude).
Arnold laments or explains the predicament of the present by turning to the past, and writes elegies
meant to create deliverance (the comprehension of the present and the past and the possession of
general ideas). 2 Arnold writes elegies, lyrical poems that convey the predicament of the present and seek
some consolation by the confrontation with the past (for example, in Dover Beach, he seeks consolation
in the lasting art and lessons of history produced in the age of Sophocles and Xenophon; in The Scholar
Gipsy, he seeks consolation in the exemplary escape from constraints that a man who loves his soul
more than his situation, as in the story included in the 1661 tract by Joseph Glanvil The Vanity of
Dogmatizing). Each of Arnolds poems moves towards some generic statement/lesson, which can be
irritating nowadays, after the twentieth century surrealistic collages and in general experimental poems
but it is the process of advancement, and the lyrical way in which poems advance, that matters in Arnolds
poetry3. Both writers search, in the past, for models to encourage the Bildung of a heroic, enduring
modern self - in an age of doubt and skepticism4. Sceptical post-romantic poetry, however, has absence, a
sense of prostration and insufficiency at its heart, as an immediate reality from which it seeks to distance
itself. Among the past fetishes/objets petit a 5 which help the poet Arnold to escape from the human prison
are: the (puritanical) return to Biblical paternalism see The Buried Life
II
The oppressive landscape of Victorian poetry
The illustration of the elegiac vein in Tennysons and Arnolds poetry (a) AND (b) the lyrical rhythm and
devices of Tennysons meditation on death In Memoriam (1850): his curt meditative tableaux contrasted
to Arnolds longer epics The Scholar Gipsy (1853 Poem: a New Edition
(a)
2

Cf. On the Modern Element in Literature, 1857 (Arnolds inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry)

If one refers only to the lesson/general idea, the poems by Arnold are ruined for twentieth
and twenty-first century readers. If, on the contrary, the images and their progress are
focused upon, the reading experience can be fully rewarding.
4

Thomas Carlyle declared the modern age an age of skepticism in On Heroes, Hero-Worship
and the Heroic in History (1840 lectures, published in 1841) where he also singled out some
modern saviours of humanity from skepticism, acting as the heroes of old, the priests, kings
and prophets: the poet and the man of letters. See lecture five The Hero as Man of Letters:
Johnson, Rousseau, Burns.
5

See Sigmund Freuds explanation about fetishes and Jacques Lacans objets petit a. Freud turned
the inanimate object worshipped by savages for its magical powers or as being inhabited by a spirit (Penguin
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 51) into an object invested with the power to satisfy ones intense desire by proxy, i.e.,
in the absence of the legitimate object of desire. Lacan extended Freuds explanation about deriving fetishistic
gratification from extraneous objects into an outline of the general mechanism for misplaced choices of objects, not
only ojects of desire, but also objects of human signification (signifiers). Signifiers are seen as slipping, ungraspable,
substitute objets petit a, which make manifest the great, overwhelming Other (Autrui) which empties of meaning
human signification processes.

3
the elegiac vein in Tennysons and Arnolds poetry
* The early Tennyson: before In Memoriam
Song, with the background of a poem about a dying swan in his first volume, Juvenilia (1830), or with
other poems in the later collections The Lady of Shalott and Other Poems (1832) and English Idylls and
Other Poems (1840):
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave ithe earth so chilly:
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
II
The air is damp, and hushd and close,
As a sick mans room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the years last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave ithe earth so chilly:
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
(Song)
The wild swans death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow : at first to the ear

4
The warble was low, and full and clear;
..
And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marsh flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.
(The Dying Swan)
or, at the beginning of The Lotos-Eaters
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream
Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below
From this atmosphere, Tennyson awakens into existence equally melancholy shadows of characters,
incarnations of sad, slothful dreams themselves:
The charmed sunset lingerd low adown

5
In the red West: thro mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Borderd with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender gallingale;
A land where all things always seemd the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.
Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, wherof they gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seemd , yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.

The opening of the other Greek fable of Tithonus, the climactic outpour of similar imagery:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath.
And after many a summer dies the swan.

**The oppressive atmosphere of Arnolds elegiac verse in Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (the
Carthusian Monastery; from Poems: a New Edition, 1853.
The autumnal evening darkens round,

The wind is up, and drives the rain;

While, hark! far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guier's stream complain,
Where that wet smoke, among the woods,
Over his boiling cauldron broods.

The next stanza illustrates an important feature of Arnoldian lyricism: there is a glimpse of hope in the
oppressive landscape and it looms greater though only for a while in Arnolds poetry.

Swift rush the spectral vapours white

Past limestone scars with ragged pines,
Showingthen blotting from our sight!
Haltthrough the cloud-drift something shines!
High in the valley, wet and drear,
The huts of Courrerie appear.
Strike leftward! cries our guide; and higher
Mounts up the stony forest-way.
At last the encircling trees retire;
Look! through the showery twilight grey
What pointed roofs are these advance?
A palace of the Kings of France?
The journey to the Carthusian monastery is the occasion for understanding the power of past creeds and
the position of the present in respect to them:
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,
Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

The present is devoid of faith and unable to say a word:

For the world cries your faith is now
But a dead time's exploded dream;

Our fathers water'd with their tears

This sea of time whereon we sail,
Their voices were in all men's ears

We pass'd within their puissant hail.

Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we stand mute, and watch the waves.

But the reminiscence of the past fills the soul with puissant (strong) weighty memories and show people
where they stand, allowing them to gain interpretive power, a fresh sense of how things stand :

"Long since we pace this shadow'd nave;

We watch those yellow tapers shine,
Emblems of hope over the grave,
In the high altar's depth divine;
The organ carries to our ear
Its accents of another sphere.
"Fenced early in this cloistral round
Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,
How should we grow in other ground?
How can we flower in foreign air?
Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease;
And leave our desert to its peace!"

A much earlier poem is explicit about what ailed Arnolds contemporary humanity longing for

DELIVERANCE from the shadow of itself6:

To Marguerite: Continued
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD , FROM THE 1852 VOLUME
AND OTHER POEMS

EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
6

See Thomas Carlyles Sartor Resartus The Everlasting Yea, after the passage with the
Infinite Shoeblack: Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said,
the Shadow of Ourselves.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order'd, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
(b)

*The lyrical rhythm and devices of Tennysons meditation on death In Memoriam (1850)
AND
**The malaise of the present in Arnolds The Scholar Gipsy (pastoral elegy)
NB Both of the following texts try to keep trace of immortality in an age subjugated by doubt and
materialism and manage the exceptional performance of opposing the modern malaise and tracking down
its causes

*The lyrical rhythm and devices of Tennysons meditation on death In Memoriam (1850)
IV
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,

That thou shouldst fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
What is it makes me beat so low?

Something it is which thou hast lost,

Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross

All night below the darkend eyes:
With morning wakes the will, and cries,,
Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.
...................................................
III
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?

The stars, she whispers, blindly run;

A web is wovn across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,

10
And murmurs from the dying sun:

And all the phantom, Nature, standsWith all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,A hollow form with empty hands.

And shall I take a thing so blind,

Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blod,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
...................................................
XI
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:

Calm and still light on yon great plain

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

11
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

..............................................................
L
Be near me when my light is low
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rackd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,

12
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

**The malaise of the present in Arnolds The Scholar Gipsy (pastoral elegy)
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts

Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field,

And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.
And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,
And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem'd, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

13
Arnolds elegies are the most impressive discursive cum lyrical expressions of the modern
predicament attributed, as it were, to remote times:
No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!
For what wears out the life of mortal men?
'Tis that from change to change their being rolls;
'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls
And numb the elastic powers.
Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,
And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,
To the just-pausing Genius we remit
Our worn-out life, and arewhat we have been.
But they contain aspirations, statements and injunctions which are nowadays impossible to
accept. The investment of unbearable nostalgia in choices of past fetichistic Objets petit a
(fetishes being, as Freud also explained substitutes for the realer experience, objects which
bring deceitful consolation; finding excessive satisfaction by intense attachments to
objects): the loner and scholar and Romantic wanderer of the Renaissance considered
superior to present people and invited to sweep them aside (a) or to avoid them (b), for fear
of losing the virtue of eternal youth, the union with whom the visionary Romantics had
intimated like the union with a fleeting shadow (see Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of
Immortality and Keatss La Belle Dame Sans Merci)
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers,
And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;
And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade and grow old at last, and die like ours.

But thou possessest an immortal lot,

And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page,
Because thou hadstwhat we, alas! have not.
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

14

Fresh, undiverted to the world without,

Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O life unlike to ours! (i)

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,

Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
.
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Yes, we await it!but it still delays,
And then we suffer! and amongst us one,
Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne (ii);
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;

(i) The same lesson and longing are to be found in The Buried Life, which singles out
exceptional, visionary moments.
(ii)

It is to counter such morbid statements that Arnold created his entire system of
intellectual consolatory theorems, which began with the Preface to the First Edition of
Poems (1853) and continued with the ideas in The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time (in Essays in Criticism The First Series) and with the ideas in The Study of
Poetry (in Essays in Criticism The Second Series)

(b)
Tennyson circumscribed and defeated death in In Memoriam (1850) by meditating about his encounters
with mourning and melancholia, as Freud would call them, for Arthur Henry Hallam
IV
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;

15
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:

O heart, how fares it with thee now,

That thou shouldst fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
What is it makes me beat so low?

Something it is which thou hast lost,

Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross

All night below the darkend eyes:
With morning wakes the will, and cries,,
Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.
...................................................
III
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?

The stars, she whispers, blindly run;

16
A web is wovn across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:

And all the phantom, Nature, standsWith all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,A hollow form with empty hands.

And shall I take a thing so blind,

Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blod,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
...................................................
XI
Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground:

Calm and deep peace on this high wold,

And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold:

17
Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main:

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

..............................................................
L
Be near me when my light is low
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rackd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,

18
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

B.
Matthew Arnolds classical elegies: poetic lessons inspired from the past and meant to secure THE
DELIVERANCE of the present from the shadow of itself 7: the lessons about the predicament of the
present using Greek examples (Sophocles and Xenophon in his late poem The Buried Life), English
early modern texts (Glanvilles The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 1661) ss a source for his pastoral elegy,
which pinpointed the malaise of the present :
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts

Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field,

And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.
7

See Thomas Carlyles Sartor Resartus The Everlasting Yea, after the passage with the
Infinite Shoeblack: Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said,
the Shadow of Ourselves.

19

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book

Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,
And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem'd, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
Arnolds elegies are the most impressive discursive cum lyrical expressions of the modern
predicament attributed, as it were, to remote times:
No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!
For what wears out the life of mortal men?
'Tis that from change to change their being rolls;
'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls
And numb the elastic powers.
Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen,
And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit,
To the just-pausing Genius we remit
Our worn-out life, and arewhat we have been.
But they contain aspirations, statements and injunctions which are nowadays impossible to
accept. The investment of unbearable nostalgia in choices of past fetichistic Objets petit a
(fetishes being, as Freud also explained substitutes for the realer experience, objects which
bring deceitful consolation; finding excessive satisfaction by intense attachments to
objects): the loner and scholar and Romantic wanderer of the Renaissance considered
superior to present people and invited to sweep them aside (a) or to avoid them (b), for fear
of losing the virtue of eternal youth, the union with whom the visionary Romantics had
intimated like the union with a fleeting shadow (see Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of
Immortality and Keatss La Belle Dame Sans Merci)
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude!
But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!
For strong the infection of our mental strife,
Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest;
And we should win thee from thy own fair life,
Like us distracted, and like us unblest.
Soon, soon thy cheer would die,
Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers,

20

And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made;

And then thy glad perennial youth would fade,
Fade and grow old at last, and die like ours.

But thou possessest an immortal lot,

And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page,
Because thou hadstwhat we, alas! have not.
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O life unlike to ours! (i)

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,

Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
.
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Yes, we await it!but it still delays,
And then we suffer! and amongst us one,
Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne (ii);
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;

(iii)

The same lesson and longing are to be found in The Buried Life, which singles out
exceptional, visionary moments.

(iv)

It is to counter such morbid statements that Arnold created his entire system of
intellectual consolatory theorems, which began with the Preface to the First Edition of
Poems (1853) and continued with the ideas in The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time (in Essays in Criticism The First Series) and with the ideas in The Study of
Poetry (in Essays in Criticism The Second Series)
III. Conclusions

21

The taste: elegiac. The paramount Victorian poetic voices were voices of epigones: they
considered themselves epigones of the grandiose, classical past but in fact they were postromantic epigones, for which see quotations from the Contributions I, p. 42, below
Post-romantic- from the point of view of Northrop Fryes Anatomy of Criticism, the First Essay, it is possible
to detach a number of features that the Romantics had added to poetry, features that were not lost in Victorian verse 8.
Regarding the poet, the Victorian poet, just like the Romantic, moves back in time and space, higher too and
beyond the conventional experience, into a more imaginative order of experience. But whereas the Romantic
remains lyrically elevated in/by that imaginative transport, the Victorian poet returns wiser and embittered, as a rule,
to his present-day audience for whose sole benefit, it appears, he has soared into the provisional infinite; hence the
shared elegiac tone associated to Victorian lyricism -the romantic love of (organic) metaphor and the Victorian
alternative love of allegory, simile and dramatic representation in general. It is not by accident that the Victorian
poets selected the form of the dramatic monologue as their favourite form of self-expression.
-Regarding the formal features shared by the Victorian with the Romantic poets, Frye mentions the tendency of the
Romantics to develop encyclopaedic, grand, long poems in the form of epics, which is retained in Victorian poetry.
The structures and motivations of these long epics can only be elucidated when relating the poetry to the poets own
design. The range of encyclopaedic epics includes:
Victorian replicas of mythological, religious or heritage epics (respectively in Tennysons Arthurian Idylls
of the King, 1859, Gerard Manley Hopkinss The Wreck of the Deutschland, 1875 or Matthew Arnolds longer
verse narratives Empedocles on Etna, 1852 and The Scholar Gipsy, 1853 );
allegorical epics (such as Tennysons The Palace of Art (1832) or the feminist fable of The Princess
(1847));
psychological epics of all hues: extensive and comprehensive spiritual autobiographies in a major elegiac
key (e.g. Tennysons peerless In Memoriam or Matthew Arnolds Thyrsis); dramatised alienist confessions
(Tennysons monodrama Maud or Robert Brownings long psychological and philosophical thriller The Ring and
the Book 1868-9

This overall view of Victorian poetry is a synthesis from the Fryean text mentioned, the
second part of the First Essay, dedicated to thematic (non-fiction).