Guest Lecture: Professor John Anderson Four Victorian Poets

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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 Arnolds
  political positions is a good illustration of the
  principle that political contradiction and
  consistency are mutable and relative.

• Belief in Progress
• Preference for Theory
• Desire to popularize French and German ideas
• Elitism
• Nationalism
• Dream of Universal Culture (p.1585)
• Reformist (p. 1586)
• Belief in the transforming power of education

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Some of Matthew Arnolds Own Binary Oppositions

• Anarchy
• Hebraism
• Criticism
• Epochs of expansion
• Acting
• Strictness of conscience

• Culture
• Hellenism
• Creative activity
• Epochs of concentration
• Thinking
• Spontaneity of conscience

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson, (1809-1892)

• Prosody paramount to him his tone painting in
  verse like Debussys in music (Compare Lady of
  Shalott, last stanza of Part One (p.1142) to
  first stanza, Part Four (p. 1145)
• (Compare Loreena McKennitts folk version of
  Lady of Shalott)
• Stephen Dedalus in Joyces Portrait of the Artist
  exclaims Tennyson a poet! Why, hes 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 darkend wholly
• Turnd to towerd Camelot.
• For ere she reachd upon the tide,
• The first house by the water-side,
• Singing in her song she died,
• The Lady of Shalott.

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Tennysons Victorian vs. Dantes 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 Homers 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 Homers model, as well as Dante
  could guess what that was -- he had no access to
  Homers 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.
  Brownings 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

• 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

• 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 (everydays in 43)
• Rapid, indecorous shifting from playfulness to
  solemnity

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from Elizabeth BarrettsLady Geraldines
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 Popes Heroic
Couplets!

• Willt 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 Keatss
Ode on a Grecian Urn

• It represents the speakers 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 Shakespeares history plays,but more like
  the poetry of Sir Walter Scott -- an actual
  historical situation is rendered dramatically

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Dover Beach

• Ah, love, let us be true
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  To one another! for the world, which seems
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  To lie before us like a land of dreams,
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  So various, so beautiful, so new,
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  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
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  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain
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  And we are here as on a darkling plain
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  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and
  flight,
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  Where ignorant armies clash by night.