Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry - morally instructive poetry (a Victorian poet is necessarily wearing a didactic, moralizing mask)
- a form of fictionalized public letter-writing - the didactic vein makes Victorian poetry be anything but realistic This comes
from its quality as public poetry in an age when the dominant ideology dictated a turning to the past for discovering
spectacular models of public action and public feeling - Victorian poetry is obsessed by the great ideas of a fictionalized
past
- the sentiment of a Victorian poem hides behind two veils: the historically remote one, classicist or medievalist, and the
Victorian lesson in spirituality, morality
- if lyrical, a Victorian poem is so in an oblique, indirect way

The Victorian conventions of the poetical:
- the dramatised poetic voice (poetry is voiced through a mask, the dramatic monologue)
- allegory (poetry voiced as fairytale or as medieval legend)
- elegiac (death, loss, regret for the vanished past, lament for the transience of life, sadness and melancholy, oblivion).

The dramatic monologue - a type of poem / a literary device - a character reveals his/her innermost thoughts and feelings,
those that are hidden throughout the course of the story line, through a poem or a speech. This monologue often reveals
hidden truths about a character, their history and their relationships. Also it can further develop a character's personality
and also be used to create irony. The dramatic monologue has a speaker and an implied auditor; the reader often perceives
a gap between what that speaker says and what he or she actually reveals; the reader takes the part of the silent listener.
The speaker uses a case-making, argumentative tone / we complete the dramatic scene from within, by means of inference
and imagination;

F. R. Leavis, Poetry and the Modern World (New Bearings in English Poetry) describes it as the poetry of escape and
withdrawal: It was possible for the poets of the Romantic period to believe that the interests animating their poetry were
the forces moving the world, or that might move it. But Victorian poetry admits implicitly that the actual world is alien and
unpoetical, and that no protest is worth making except the protest of withdrawal.

Victorian poetry is often referred to as post-Romantic poetry. The Romantic feature that was not lost in Victorian verse: the
Victorian poet moves back in time and space, beyond the conventional experience, into a more imaginative order of
experience

Missing features in the Victorian poems as compared to the Romantic ones:

- the Victorian poet failed to exercise the autonomy of perception and judgment - he failed to radically turn away from the
contemporary social or public thinking / he succumbed to the stereotypes and values of his culture and was unable to judge
his culture critically
- Victorian poetry is outspoken or simply elegiac, where Romantic poetry had been mystical (the Romantic love of
metaphor/symbol vs. the Victorian love of allegory and dramatic representation)

- the belief in the creative genius of the poet in Romanticism is missing from the Victorian poem. The Victorian poet is
always wearing a didactic, moralizing, allegorical mask. (His poems can no longer be called lyrical ballads because they are
learned allegories addressing well-informed gentlemen and ladies)
10. .Victorian poets felt they couldnt deal with all that,they started to realize that new world as alianated and unpoetical
and we can see that thay started withdrawing from it,they turned to the past.Through poems we can see that they created
those dream worlds where they felt safe,sheltered.They started to hide behind their characters(Ulysses,the Duke of
Ferara),they felt very insecure.The best description of those dream worlds we can see in The Lady of Shalott where there
is a contrast between the real world(Camelot)and dream world,the world of artists(the island where the lady
lives).Throughout the poem we can see that those worlds dont understand each other due to the lack of
communication,that art and the artist die when exposed to the real world,its too much for them.
1. Sartor resartus
2. The stones of venice
3. The study of poetry
i plus iz skripte
1. from The renaissance
3. Poetry and the modern world