Nineteenth Century Poetry PDF

Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour CHAPTER ONE NINETEENTH CENTURY POETRY SECTION ONE THE ENGLISH VICTORIANS BACKGROUND There is no clear division, no obvious shi...

Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour CHAPTER ONE NINETEENTH CENTURY POETRY SECTION ONE THE ENGLISH VICTORIANS BACKGROUND There is no clear division, no obvious shift in values and taste, between the Romantic and Victorian periods. Many critics date the beginning of the Victorian period at 1832, the year of passage of the First Reform Bill, which gave middle-class men the legal right to vote; others use 1837, the beginning of Victoria's reign. However, historians no longer refer unquestioningly to the "Victorian Age" as the precise years associated with the monarch but instead concentrate on a shorter period—a "high age"—from about 1830 to 1880. The Victorian era is often associated with the growing size and influence of the middle classes and with the ascendancy of certain values described as middle class: "Victorian" virtues such as hard work, thrift, conformity, faith in progress, and a generally serious outlook on life. These values were expressed in poetry of the age. Similarly, the poetry of the age is typified by doubt and anxiety, in spiritual matters as well as moral and political issues. The early Victorian years witnessed the emergence of a cluster of values and beliefs that represented the central ideas of Victorianism, such as the developments in governance, economic and social life, science, and learning that capture the essential features of 8  Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry Victorianism. In the age of Queen Victoria, the British people's long struggle for personal liberty was accomplished and democratic government became fully well-established. The monarchy, which had been established in the late medieval period, was now headed by a symbol of the unity of the empire rather than an active ruler. The aristocracy became a mere remnant of a faded social hierarchy. The House of Commons was now the center of political power in Great Britain. Parliament passed a series of electoral reform bills, entitling the men of the nation to choose their leaders and representatives for themselves. In governance, one can look to the reforms which changed the structure of parliament, leading to a tradition of evolutionary change with a major Reform Act in 1832 enfranchising the middle class and the expansion of local, middle-class political power with the Municipal Corporations Act (1835). After 1832, it became clear that social betterment would be achieved through legislation and education rather than revolution. Poets such as Thomas Hood and E. B. Browning depict the hard lot of the underprivileged, particularly children and the working poor. The slave trade had been abolished in 1807 and slavery itself in 1832. It would last until 1864 in America. There was also feminist protest, but this was a social revolution for which the Victorian world was not yet prepared; Victoria herself (crowned in 1837) opposed it. A remarkable transformation took place within mid-century England as enlightened advocates exposed injustices old and new. Among the revolutionary acts passed by reforming parliaments were the Factory Act of 1833, regulating child labor; the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, regulating workhouses; the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, 9 Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour unifying town governments; an act of 1842 prohibiting the employment of women and children in mines; another in 1843 prohibiting imprisonment for debt; the first public health act in 1848; another factory act, shortening hours and days, in 1850; a second major political reform in 1868; and, finally, the great public schools act of 1870. If there were fewer reforming acts in less-developed America, it was in part because fewer were needed. One of the few European states, to avoid armed revolution during the 19th century, Britain was perhaps the most socially advanced nation in the world, as well as the most industrialized, for humanitarianism and progress had become its prevailing creeds. In technology, the Victorians were strongly associated with industrialism, transport, communication, travel, technologies, inventions and machines. Many developments such as steam locomotion, which carries passengers on a public rail line, iron, steel ships, and telegraphy helped the Victorians triumph over so many challenges of distance and power that had held up such progress in earlier times. The essential character of Victorian technological determinism was that science and the practical men could change the world through invention and implementation. Leaps in technology were matched by developments in social thought. Prophets of progress and the enemies of industrial modernity competed for space, and both groups contributed to the sense of what Victorianism was about. From the 1830s, the critics of Victorianism grew. Modernity was feared by many and loathed by some. Tories, such as the "Young England" group, which included Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), looked back to a bygone age of preindustrial harmony, where deference, social equilibrium, and a more agreeable 10  Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry life were once thought to exist. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) also shared the "Young England" aversion to modernity but looked forward, not back. He disliked the Victorian tendency to seek mechanical solutions to human problems and sought, instead, a reinvention of an earlier morality, but in a future setting. This style of criticism connected many early 19th-century thinkers, such as Carlyle and Robert Owen (1771–1858), to later socialists, such as William Morris (1834–1896). By the 1880s the critique of Victorianism was powerful indeed. Unlike on the continent, where Marxism—Karl Marx's telos, the goal or endpoint of civilization's quest for utopia— was highly influential, most British socialism sought accommodation with capitalism. Sidney Webb (1859–1947) represented an administrative type of socialism, based upon efficiency and organization. William Morris's utopian socialism was characterized by a more fundamental attack upon capitalism and a pursuit of an alternative moral and spiritual way of life. Traditional interpretations of society as a static entity were undermined as the period progressed. Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theories of evolution and Herbert Spencer's (1820–1903) considerations upon human development radically altered classic Victorian notions of society and how to manage it. Darwin's evolutionary theory revolves around the notion that the result of the fittest surviving to mate with one another is that newer and fitter forms of life constantly come into being. The newest and fittest form, naturally, is man. Social Darwinism combines evolutionary thought with the already accepted mode of utilitarianism. In economic life, the radical essentials of political economy and utilitarianism reached a high point prior to the 1850s. The 11 Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, with its emphasis on "the greatest good for the greatest number," shows that act is best which, since it offers maximum benefits to the most members of society, promotes the greatest social progress. Political economy led to formation of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. Samuel Smiles' (1812–1904) Self Help, in 1859, had been pushed by the tendency of the working class to collectivize in the face of demands for individualism; hence, there was a rise of friendly societies, trade unions, co-operative movements, and other examples of collective identification by the people. There were also other progress-centered developments in thought such as American "Manifest Destiny"1 and Mary Baker Eddy's "Every day in every way things get better and better." Against this concept of progress lies its opposite and what may even be seen as its necessary complement. A society that is constantly progressing is undergoing constant change, which in turn means that traditional institutions and ways of life must break down. In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Adams expresses this idea in terms of the twin images of virgin and dynamo. The virgin, representative of traditional culture, symbolizes stability and order, a manageable, if static, society. The dynamo, the modern society, spins constantly faster, changing incessantly, leaving its members with a sense of chaos and confusion. Whereas the idea of progress was a product of mid-19th century thinkers, the notion of cultural breakdown achieved 1 This phrase was coined in 1845 to celebrate the seizure of Texas as evidence of the nation's imperative to settle every corner of a "continent allotted by Providence." It made it plausible for the United States to seize upon an 1846 border dispute in Texas as a premise to declare war on Mexico and thereby gain much of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. 12  Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry its widest circulation late in the 19th century and into the 20th, receiving its fullest development, perhaps, in the work of T. S. Eliot. In religion, Victorianism balanced the ancient regime Anglicanism of the Church of England with a growing pluralism through alternative Christianities, new faiths, and the toleration of unbelief. The Religious Census of 1851 revealed a general weakening of popular interest in the established church, whilst Roman Catholicism prospered through Irish migration. Victorianism may be equated with spiritual piety and Christian morality, but alternative and opposite forces also had some importance. Atheism, advocated most notably by Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895), offered, by the 1870s, an alternative to faith in the attempt to answer profound questions about the nature of being. The high road to orthodoxy proved disastrous. Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poets after 1850, were orthodoxy religious. Nineteenth century literature, particularly in England, mirrored the development of thought in the period. Victorianism came to be associated with patriarchal social values, stressing the importance of family and an image of motherhood captured well in Tennyson's poem, The Princess (1847): Man for the field and woman for the hearth; for the sword, and for the needle she; Man with the head, and women with the heart; Man to command, and woman to obey; All else is confusion. Thus, poetry, as well as prose, painting, and music, reflected hegemonic notions. Yet, the stereotype of the Victorian family perhaps assumed its importance precisely because there were so many challenges to it. In the cities, drink and crime denied many children 13 Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour the full influence of parental guidance, and the critics of industrialism saw in female and child labor a collection of evils that had to be addressed. But economic conditions placed women and children in this position. Poverty, drunkenness, and alcoholism were sometimes causes of prostitution. The early Victorian poets admired and imitated the Romantics. Indeed, Tennyson, perhaps the representative poet of his age, was also in many ways the most Romantic of the great Victorians. He carried on the Romantic style and subject matter and continued to experiment with verse form and diction. Definitely, his poetry, as well as the verse of Matthew Arnold, is typically Victorian in its depiction of a man's struggle between spiritual doubt and faith. Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) represents the chief Victorian conflict between science and faith more than any work of its era; and Tennyson's attempt to reconcile the religious doubts arising from his personal sorrow and the effects of pre-Darwinian theories of evolution was hailed by thinkers of his time as an intellectual landmark. Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1851) is the fullest expression of its author's religious doubt and a classic text of Victorian anxiety in the face of lost faith. It was written soon after the publication of that epic of Victorian doubt, Tennyson's In Memoriam of, and contemporaneously with the atheist poetry of Arnold's friend Arthur Hugh Clough. The Victorians as a group have been characterized as more "realistic" than the Romantics. They were more apt to write poems directly concerning the social and philosophical problems of the day. Robert Browning's dramatic monologues explore the inner life of many historical or eccentric figures, but in a "realistic" way. The dramatic monologue is a poetic form in which there is only one speaker. When there is only one speaker, we necessarily have to 14  Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry weigh carefully what he or she is telling us, and we often have to "read between the lines" in keeping an objective perspective on the story or incidents that the speaker describes to us. The reader must work through the words of the speaker to discover his true character and the attitude of the poet toward the character. The poem is "dramatic" in the sense that it is like a drama, a play, in which one character speaks to another, and there is a sense of action and movement as on stage. In the 20th century Browning's dramatic form of the monologue has been adopted most directly by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock creates a monologue spoken without a direct dramatic auditor. This form is directly related to the rise of the persona or mask in modern poetry. In recent years such poems have been called mask-lyrics. Poems by Pound and Eliot, for example, provide a monologic and dramatic speaker like Tennyson's, one more closely identified with the lyric voice of the poet than with the dramatic voice of an imagined character. Such poems can be distinguished from strictly dramatic monologues, which set up a necessarily ironic distance between poet, speaker, and reader. E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost all contributed variations on the form; Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashberry subsequently employed a monologic mode that reveals a tension between the poet and the speaker of the poem. Monologue is a characteristic of all poems that strive to deny dialogue or control possible responses to the utterance. One by one, traditional verities disappeared from English and American literature, and more rapidly in Britain. God was doubtful, Nature cruel, History unkind, Love impossible, Man animalistic and corrupt. Matthew Arnold is the poet, who articulated the new 15 Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour disillusionment most forcefully. He saw himself as an isolated wanderer through a post-Christian wilderness of historical and personal estrangement. Arnold sought for love and could not find it. Several later Victorian poets, including Browning, D. G. Rossetti, and George Meredith wrote extensively of their relationships with women, and of the failure of love; others turned from normal eroticism altogether. Throughout the century literature had been closely allied with art. Much of its descriptive poetry, for example, was based upon painted forebears or similar contemporary work; thus, Wordsworth is often compared with John Constable, Shelley with J. M. W. Turner, Coleridge with German Romantic art, Byron with Eugene Delacroix, and Browning with the Impressionists. Several important writers, including Blake, John Ruskin, Morris, and D. G. Rossetti, were authentic artists in their own right; others combined their verbal work with others' art to collaborate upon illustrated editions. That poets were makers of pictures was assumed throughout the century. They became interpreters of pictures also, as can be seen in Bowles, Wordsworth, and especially Browning. For many later nineteenth century poets, however, the writer was no longer a prophet but a critic, concerned less with cosmic purpose than with man's revelation of himself through art. It is symptomatic of the times that poetry became more personal, less prestigious, and even private (Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins) as public utterances turned instead to evaluation of the literary past. Thus, Arnold virtually abandoned poetry for criticism of various kinds, while D. G. Rossetti, Lowell, Swinburne, and William Watson all reveal critical aspirations overtopping creative ones. Major anthologies of the time, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and 16  Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry Francis Palgrave, show that poetry appealed to the later nineteenth century more as conventional verbal prettiness than as original thought; a great deal of it was essentially decoration. Fanciful, but not imaginative (in the searching, Romantic sense), late Victorian poetry soon became, with only a few exceptions, a minor art, as statements of intellectual importance tended increasingly to be made in prose. In mid-century, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his circle—including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris—was a major attempt to defend creative imagination against the economic, social, and intellectual forces that were depressing it, which is to say, against the impersonality of manufacture, the bad taste of the rising middle class, and the unidimensional reality of empirical science. They reacted to what many artists saw as the empty materialism of the times, and attempted, through the use of symbolism and imagery, to return to what they saw as the unity of spirit of the Middle Ages. William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was, with his brother, largely responsible for bringing Whitman, Joaquin Miller, and Edward Fitzgerald (The Rubáyat of Omar Khayyám, 1859) to critical attention, while reviving interest in the work of Blake and Shelley. Only a small coterie in London, however, fully appreciated how desperate the artistic situation had become. From them emerged William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), an Irish cultural nationalist influenced by Thomas Moore and Sir Walter Scott, who based his major poems (mostly twentieth century) upon the bold visions of Blake and Shelley, while rejecting Tennysonian doubt and the depressing outlook of scientific materialism. Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Arnold, Hardy, and Yeats are now regarded as the most significant poets of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and all have had their impact upon subsequent writers. 17 Mohammad Al-Hussini Mansour Tennyson's In Memoriam managed a doubtful immortality for the young skeptic that it commemorated, but other poets of the time were less sure, as Clough and Arnold remained agnostics at best. In Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) Robert Browning rejected both doctrinal and evangelical Christianity in favor of a theistic religion of love, Arnold implying much the same in "Dover Beach" (1851). While meeting the equivalent American spiritual crisis with more gusto, Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass (1855) that "Creeds and schools" were "in abeyance." His own faith derived from all religions and did not include curiosity about God. In a poem of 1871 addressed to Whitman, however, Swinburne admitted that "God is buried and dead to us." Among American poets, Melville and Dickinson became religious seekers; Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow, among others, remained relatively confident of supernatural goodness throughout the 1850's and 1860's, but their optimism (shared by Tennyson and Browning to some extent) seemed increasingly tenuous to younger readers. The late nineteenth century produced the expected countermovement, in which the characteristic poem is much darker, more decadent, suspicious of the openness and health of the High Victorians. Under the influence of the darker Romantics and the French symbolists (who got their own dose of dark Romanticism from Edgar Allan Poe), the late Victorians from the Pre-Raphaelites on demonstrate a tendency toward the sinister and the unhealthy, toward madness and dissipation. Prostitutes, drug addicts, criminals—all those, in short, from the underside of society, from the social strata largely ignored by Tennyson—figure heavily in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, the early William Butler Yeats, and, of course, Oscar Wilde. Their fascination with dark subjects and dark treatments shows 18  Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries Poetry: Victorian and Modern Poetry a suspicion of the methods and beliefs of the earlier Victorians analogous to Adams' suspicion of progress. Their work collectively embodies the fin de siècle sense of impending change, the exhaustion of old modes, the existential ennui of a society in decline. The late Victorian poets were not a new beginning but a clear end, a cry for the new, while in America the cry was silence, the absence of any major poetic talents. On both sides of the Atlantic, poetry in English was a gap waiting to be filled and awaiting of something as yet unknown. Overall, the 19th century was a time in which the world changed radically in ways that laid the foundation for our own. The industrialization of the Western world began in Britain in the late 18th century; the modern democratic state was created largely in response to the social and economic changes accompanying industrialization. At the end of Victoria's reign, relations between humans and nature as well as social and family relations had changed beyond recognition. The extent of these changes can be seen in comparing the countryside and rural people of Wordsworth or John Clare, different though they were, with the world described by the late 19th-century poet John Davidson. The poetry of the time reflects the stress and challenges of these changes. At the close of the Victorian era, the beginning of the 20th century brought challenges of its own. The violence of World War I dealt a shattering blow to British and American society's faith in progress, a legacy of the Victorians. And in 1922 the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land marked a new era in poetry, much as Lyrical Ballads had 120 years earlier. Its obscurity, complexity, and grim, anti-Romantic spirit would influence poets for the next several decades. 19