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Guest Lecture: Professor John Anderson Four Victorian Poets

Matthew Arnold

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Robert Browning

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“Criticism first; a time of true creativity, perhaps…

hereafter, when criticism has done its work.”

--Matthew Arnold

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Matthew Arnold, (1822-1888)

Inherits a critical tradition from Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Unlike Coleridge, he acknowledges

his debt to German philosophers A secular writer, he still believes

strongly in absolutes -- that we can discern, for instance, what is “the best that is known and thought in the world”

He says criticism can “attain any real authority” by being “absolutely and entirely independent” of “sects and parties” (1578)

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Is Matthew Arnold a Republican or a Democrat?Both and Neither. That pair of terms has no historical relevance to him. Reading Arnold’s political positions is a good illustration of the principle that political contradiction and consistency are mutable and relative.

Belief in ProgressPreference for TheoryDesire to popularize French and German ideasElitismNationalismDream of Universal Culture (p.1585)Reformist (p. 1586)Belief in the transforming power of education

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Some of Matthew Arnold’s Own Binary Oppositions

Culture Hellenism Creative activity Epochs of

concentration Thinking Spontaneity of

conscience

Anarchy Hebraism Criticism Epochs of expansion

Acting Strictness of

conscience

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, (1809-1892)

Prosody paramount to him; his tone painting in verse like Debussy’s in music (Compare “Lady of Shalott,” last stanza of Part One (p.1142) to first stanza, Part Four (p. 1145)

(Compare Loreena McKennitt’s folk version of “Lady of Shalott”)

Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist exclaims: “Tennyson a poet! Why, he’s only a rhymester!”

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from “The Lady of Shalott”

Heard a carol, mournful, holy

Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,

Till her blood was frozen slowly,

And her eyes were darken’d wholly

Turn’d to tower’d Camelot.

For ere she reach’d upon the tide,

The first house by the water-side,

Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

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Tennyson’s Victorian vs. Dante’s Medieval Ulysses

Ulysses speaks to his men, before his voyage (Tennyson and Hallam are present only in the subtext) -- like Dramatic Monologue

Setting: Greece Blank verse, 70 lines Written after Homer’s model, via

Dante (the medieval casts its Arthurian shadow, even on this classical story)

Suggests an optimistic ending, perhaps the Blessed Isles -- but the adventure never begins

Ulysses speaks to Dante, after his voyage (he quotes himself, however, persuading his men) -- an exemplar

Setting: Hell Terza rima, 52 lines Written after Homer’s model, as

well as Dante could guess what that was -- he had no access to Homer’s text

Spoken after the tragic ending: Ulysses and crew drown by the Will of God, within sight of Purgatory

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

She inherited a tradition: Felicia Hemans (the best-selling poet of the

Romantic period) Charlotte Smith (whose success with the sonnet

form made it a favorite among later writers) “Aurora Leigh remains, with all its imperfections, a

book that still lives .... [Mrs. Browning’s] bad taste, her tortured ingenuity, her floundering, scrambling, and confused impetuosity have space to spend themselves here without inflicting a deadly wound, while her ardour and abundance, her brilliant descriptive powers, her shrewd and caustic humour, infect us with her own enthusiasm. We laugh, we protest, we complain — it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer — but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled.”

-- Virginia Woolf

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Sonnets from the Portugueseand the Modern Lyric

Similarities

Both confessional and fictionalized Intimate tone Erotic undercurrents (#13) Formal conventions undercut

By off-rhymes (rough/off/proof in #13) Rhyme on insignificant words (for in

#14) Rhyme on unlikely words (accessible

in #24), Rhyme on casual forms (everyday’s in

#43) Rapid, indecorous shifting from

playfulness to solemnity

Differences

Direct statement of strong emotion apparently not meant ironically

Archaisms (certes in #14, Oh, list in #38, etc. etc.)

Casual employment of a strict form

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from Elizabeth Barrett’s“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”

There, obedient to her praying, did I read aloud the poems

Made to Tuscan flutes, or instruments more various of our own;

Read the pastoral parts of Spenser -- or the subtle interflowings

Found in Petrarch's sonnets -- here's the book -- the leaf is folded down!

Or at times a modern volume, -- Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl,

Howitt's ballad-verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie --

Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

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Robert Browning, (1812-1889)

His most significant contribution to English poetry: the verse form called Dramatic Monologue

His epic, The Ring and the Book, is profoundly relativistic -- the same story told repeatedly from multiple, mutually-exclusive perspectives

His exploration of individual voices vastly expanded the language available to poets

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Look What Robert Browning Did to Pope’s Heroic Couplets!

Will’t please you to sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there.

•Enjambment •Ambiguous rhyme sounds•Off-balance lines•No decorum in diction

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“My Last Duchess” is Ekphrastic, like Keats’s “Ode

on a Grecian Urn”

It represents the speaker’s response to a work of art

(in these two cases, an imaginary one)

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“My Last Duchess” is also historical fiction

Like Shakespeare’s history plays,but more like the poetry of Sir Walter

Scott -- an actual historical situation is rendered dramatically

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Dover BeachAh, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.