The Victorian Era

Victorian Poetry

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian poetry stood second only to the novel among the literary forms of the age, and it gave the period some of its most enduring works, from In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) to Goblin Market (1862). Victorian poetry was written in a wide range of forms, including the dramatic monologue, the lyric, the elegy, the ode, and the sonnet, and in styles that ranged from the late Romantic manner of the early period to the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Decadent manners of the later period. The history of Victorian poetry is examined in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word. The context of the period is set out in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Major Poets of the Victorian Period

The Victorian period produced a generation of brilliant poets who shaped the literature of the period. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), who became Poet Laureate in 1850, wrote In Memoriam A. H. H., The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses, Maud, and Idylls of the King. Robert Browning (1812-1889), the master of the dramatic monologue, wrote My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, Men and Women, and The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese and the verse novel Aurora Leigh, and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), poet and critic, wrote Dover Beach, The Scholar-Gipsy, and Thyrsis. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), the leading poet of the Aesthetic movement, wrote Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), painter and poet of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, wrote The Blessed Damozel and the sonnet sequence The House of Life, while his sister Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote Goblin Market and some of the finest devotional lyrics of the age. William Morris (1834-1896), poet, designer, and manufacturer, wrote The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems and The Earthly Paradise.

The Forms of Victorian Poetry

The Victorian poets wrote in a wide range of forms, including the dramatic monologue, the lyric, the elegy, the ode, and the sonnet. The dramatic monologue was a particular feature of the period: a poem in which a single speaker, addressing a silent listener at a critical moment, reveals his or her character in ways the speaker is often unaware of. The form was particularly suited to the exploration of psychology and morality, and its most celebrated examples include My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover, The Bishop Orders His Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning, and Ulysses, Tithonus, and St. Simeon Stylites by Alfred Tennyson. The history of the dramatic monologue is examined in What is a dramatic monologue?.

The Movements of Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry was shaped by a number of important movements. The early Victorian poets inherited the legacy of the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the influence of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats can be felt throughout the poetry of the period.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-Victorian period carried the Romantic inheritance in a new direction, and its poets included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement is examined in Who was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?.

The Aesthetic movement of the late Victorian period, associated with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, developed out of Pre-Raphaelitism, and it was followed in the 1890s by the Decadent poets, among them Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. Through the criticism of Arthur Symons, the French Symbolist movement also reached English poetry in the final years of the century, preparing the ground for the modernist poets of the next generation.

The Publication of Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry was published in a wide range of formats. The single-author collection was the principal means by which the major poets issued their work, while anthologies such as Francis Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury (1861) made the best-known poems available to a wide audience. Many poems first appeared in periodicals, magazines, and newspapers, which brought poetry to a mass readership; The Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, was first published in the Examiner in 1854.

Victorian volumes of poetry were often handsome objects in their own right, issued in decorated cloth bindings with gilt ornament and frequently accompanied by illustrations from leading artists. The illustrated gift book, of which the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson with designs by Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti is the most famous example, became a characteristic product of the mid-Victorian publishing trade.

Conclusion

Its poets worked in many forms, above all the dramatic monologue, the lyric, and the elegy, and their work reached readers through collections, anthologies, and periodicals alike. The history of Victorian poetry is examined in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word and in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.