From Romanticism to Modernism

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Testo

ROMANTICISM
ROMANTIC POETRY
‘Romantic’ meant: “typical of the old romances.”
From the eighteenth century the term became: “something marked by feelings, such loneliness and melancholy, rather than by intellect.” The romantic poets were ‘inspired’ by moon, darkness and from all the feelings and emotions that come from the dark side of man.
The first poets who used the term ‘romantic’ were German writers as Goethe or Schiller, who belonged to the movement “Sturm und Drang”. The Romantic Movement developed in many European countries as France, Germany, Italy and England, with different interests.
In Great Britain the Romantic poets are divided into two waves: to the first one belong W. Blake, W. Wordsworth, S. Coleridge; to the second wave belong G. Byron, P. Shelley and J. Keats.
The Romantic Movement rediscovers themes as individualism and subjectivity, the importance of imagination, a sort of religiosity (often a pantheistic religion). These poets stressed their individualism isolating from society, which took various forms: isolation in nature, revolt and love for revolution, exile, love for exotic places, interesting for history and folklore.
Another important purpose of these poets was the search for infinity, an impossible task that became a sort of mission. This made the poet as a prophet.
Romantic love of nature is represented in the glorification of simple scenes and commonplaces. The counterpart of this interest was fascination in supernatural.
William Blake
1757 – 1827
William Blake was born in London in a lower class family and later he became an engraver, which became his main activity. In his mind writing and the visual arts was closely associated and this idea can be confirmed by his first collection of poetry, Songs of Innocence, in 1789, which was engraved and illustrated by himself.
He accepted poverty and obscurity rather than be a conventional artist and he reacted against all traditional forms. Politically, French and American Revolution attracted him and in London he met political radicals as William Godwin.
Many of his poems are a criticism of the suffering of the poor and oppressed. He attacked institutions as the Anglican Church or the Monarchy.
For Blake, the truth was difficult to understand and to express. So, Blake refused to make concessions to public taste: he rebelled against an aristocratic concept of art, but his individualism and his refusal of traditions, make his poems difficult to read.
Blake elaborated a view of the world in a complex mythology, fully expressed in his ‘Prophetic Books’: The French Revolution, America, Milton, Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake also used alchemical, mystical, occult and oriental symbology.
Blake didn’t believe in rationality and he revalued faith and intuition and denied the truth of sensorial experience.
In his ideals, contrasts gain a central importance: the possibility of progress is located in the tension between contraries as we can see in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Texts:
●The Lamb (from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience)
● The Chimney Sweeper (1 & 2) (from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience)
● The Tyger (from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience)
● London (from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience)
William Wordsworth
1770 – 1850
W. Wordsworth was born in the Lake District, a natural place which was a source of inspiration for a group of romantic poets, the ‘Lake Poets’. After his studies, Wordsworth went to France, where he was attracted by the ideals of the revolution. Lack of money forced him to return to England. After a nervous breakdown, he recovered his health with the aid of his new friend: Samuel T. Coleridge. This friendship was very important for the development of romantic poetry and the immediate result was a collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads.
Important themes of Wordsworth’s poetry were ordinary subjects, and love of nature. Several poems are centred on children and childhood: Wordsworth saw the children closer than the adults to the original communion with nature. This idea developed in a philosophical meaning and Wordsworth believed in the pre-existence of the soul: after birth the soul loses its perfect knowledge, a man grown up loses all his memory of union with nature and universe.
● Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads was written by Wordsworth and Coleridge: the first writing poetry involved with a simple nature described in an ordinary language, the second composing poems based on exotic or fantastic nature. Lyrical Ballads marked the appearance of modern poetry: the subject of the poet was himself and he could choose any kind of style.
To the second edition of Lyrical Ballads was addicted a ‘Preface’, written by Wordsworth, which can be considered a romantic manifesto. Here are described ideals as:
- A description of the poet as ‘man speaking to men’; an ordinary man with more imagination than others (‘Romantic Genius’), able to communicate his feelings and experience.
- Poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” originated from “emotions recollected in tranquillity”.
- How all human activity is the subject of poetry.
Many of Wordsworth’s poems deals with nature:
- Nature as the silent and solitary countryside
- Nature as a source of inspiration for man, who’s a part of it.
- Nature as a life-force, which has a real life and can communicate with us (pantheistic vision)
In the “Lucy Poems” Wordsworth describes his own love for a country girl, a “natural” girl, opposed to him, a man separated from nature.
Texts:
● The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
● Daffodils or I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
● The Solitary Reaper
● She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
● Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
● from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772 – 1834
Coleridge’s life was afflicted by his addiction to opium, maybe due to medical treatment. In 1797 he met Wordsworth, and this was the beginning of the period of intellectual collaboration that produced Lyrical Ballads. He was more interested than Wordsworth in supernatural and exotic themes. The years from 1799 and 1810 were full of worries for him: already married, he fell in love with Wordsworth’s sister and he took increasing quantities of opium; he also quarrelled with his greatest friend.
He threw himself into literary and intellectual activity: he produced his Biographia Literaria, two collections of poems and philosophical and theological essays. In his last years, he even reconciled with Wordsworth and with his wife.
Texts:
● The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and summary of parts 5 and 6)
● Kubla Khan
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 – 1822
Shelley was born into a rich, conservative family in Sussex. His father was a Member of the Parliament and Percy initially followed the family tradition, going to school at Eton and Oxford. There, he was nicknamed “mad Shelley” for his rebellion against authority. At Oxford Shelley collaborated in writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled from the University.
In 1814 Shelley fell in love with the daughter of the radical philosopher Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and went with her to France and Switzerland, abandoning his first wife. A believer in free love, Shelley asked her (Harriet Westbrook) to join them and live together, which she refused. On returning to London, Shelley was condemned as an atheist and immoralist. His first wife committed suicide and shortly after Shelley married Mary; then, they left England for Italy.
Shelley and his family settled in a villa near Lerici. During an excursion to Leghorn by boat, a storm arose, drowning Shelley and the friend who was with him.
Like Lord Byron, Shelley was representative of the second generation of Romantic poets. His personality is full of contrasts:
- He was a dreamer, an Utopian thinker.
- He opposed traditional religion and tended to the spiritual world through Platonic mysticism, magic, the supernatural.
- He searched for ideal (ideal love, ideal society); sometimes he thought perfection was only possible in the other world, sometimes he thought it could be reached on earth.
Texts:
● Ode to the West Wind
● From Julian and Maddalo
John Keats
1795 – 1821
Keats was born in London. His father died when he was eight and his mother when he was fourteen. John was first made an apprentice to a doctor, and then went on to study medicine, but soon abandoned a medical career for literature. In this choice he was influenced by Leigh Hunt, a radical, who encouraged Keats, introducing him to William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Shelley, and many other artists of the time.
In 1816 he published a beautiful sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, and Sleep and Poetry. In 1818 Endymion appeared, a long allegory of his search for an ideal female love.
After some bad criticisms on his first works, other problems arose for Keats. He fell in love with Fanny Brawne, but his illness as well as his self-imposed dedication to poetry made it impossible for him to marry her. In 1819 Keats produced an astonishing series of masterpieces in which a deeper inspiration can be felt: his famous odes, To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, On Melancholy, and Hyperion, a long unfinished poem.
In 1820 he went to Italy in a vain attempt to recover his health, but he died in Rome in February 1821. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
Texts:
● When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be
● La Belle Dame Sans Merci
● Ode on a Grecian Urn
ROMANTIC PROSE
Walter Scott
1771 – 1832
Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh into a professional middle-class family who possessed a strong sense of tradition. As a child he became familiar with many legends as stories of the past and these were to be a potent influence on his literary work. He composed and published a series of full-length Romantic narratives in verse, but the success of Byron’s verse tales and his own tiredness with narrative poetry made Scott turn to prose. His plots are based on strange and uncommon incidents, linked with the romance tradition.
Scott is often credited with having ‘invented’ the historical novel, a novel whose story takes place in a historical past. This is not strictly true, but he was instrumental in perfecting it and establishing it as a recognised genre. He expressed the Romantic interest in the past, the Middle Ages in particular, and in folk traditions.
Texts:
● From Ivanhoe
This is Scott’s most famous novel. The story is set during the reign of Richard I, the Lion Heart; it describes the struggle between two peoples: the Saxon, the “original” British, and the Normans, the conquerors. In the novel are depicted more than 154 characters and we can see different social classes:
- High class: Anglo-Saxons and Normans
- Low class: Saxons
- Jews
- (Templars: priests and warriors)
The main plot is the story of Ivanhoe, a Saxon knight disinherited by his father, who is in love with Rowena, Cedric’s young ward. In the novel there are many other subplots, concerning with Jewish tradition (Rebecca and his father), the warrior’s ideal (King Richard, the Templars, Robin Hood), the theme of familiar unity (as the main plot evolves to the final reconciliation). In the text we can identify three main points, from which the story radically changes:

1. The Tournament: here is discovered the identity of the disinherited knight, Ivanhoe.
2. The Castle of Torquilstone: Robin Hood and the Black Knight (King Richard) rescue the prisoners of the Templar Knight.
3. The liberation of Rebecca by Ivanhoe.
Jane Austen
1795 – 1817
Jane Austen was the major novelist of the early nineteenth century. Her life was tranquil and uneventful. His father was the rector of a village in English country: he was a learned man and this influenced Jane. She started writing prose, verse and drama at an early age.
One of her most famous works, Sense and Sensibility, was written as an epistolary novel, Elinor and Marriane, and it’s an example of Jane’s ability to describe real and lively characters. The novel’s plot is simple; it’s rather an investigation of the different attitudes to life of two sisters: Elinor is calm and full of common “sense”, while Marriane is sentimental and has little control over her emotions (“sensibility”). Jane Austen satirised the exaggerated sentimentality of contemporary novels, and rejects a purely romantic and sentimental view of love.
Pride and Prejudice is one of the most best known and most admired of her novels: is a vivid picture of provincial England.
THE VICTORIAN AGE
VICTORIAN PROSE
THE EARLY VICTORIAN NOVEL
For the first time in literary history, in the Victorian Age the novel became the leading genre. The greater part of the reading public was reading novels. This genre reflected the new social and economic developments, scientific discoveries, and the ethical problems raised by the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest early Victorian novelists were Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Tackeray. With them we have first-rate novelist as Charlotte and Emily Brontë.
Novels were commonly read aloud by well-to-do families, especially in the evenings after dinner. Public readings were also common among the lower class.
Victorian readers expected to be instructed and edified, and at the same time to be entertained.
Charles Dickens
1812-1870
Charles Dickens was born at Portsmouth. When Charles was ten the family moved to London and there he was given regular schooling until his father was sent to prison for debt. Charles was forced to go to work in a factory. The prison, the poor quarters of London, life in the city streets and the other boys working in the factory remained in his mind and profoundly influenced his novels.
Charles was taken from the factory and attended school intermittently until he went to work as a clerk in a legal office. There he soon developed a permanent hatred for lawyers and the law as an institution. He then became a parliamentary reporter. This work helped him to understand the feelings and reactions of his readers.
His personal life was not happy. He married Catherine Hogarth, but rapidly became disillusioned, although they had ten children. He seems to have become more conscious of social injustice, political incompetence, the poverty and suffering of the great mass of the people, and the class conflicts of Victorian England, and the result was an increasingly critical attitude towards contemporary society.
An example is Oliver Twist, which tells the suffering of an orphan brought up in a workhouse, who then runs away to London and joins a gang of thieves made up of children. In Hard Times he deals with the sufferings of the factory system and the harm done by the Utilitarian philosophy.
Later, Dickens turned to semi autobiographical themes. David Copperfield drew on many of his own experiences and contains a splendid fictionalised portrait of his father in Mr Mecawber. Great Expectations is a well-organised novel, again on the theme of ‘growing up’, as well as the social themes of pride and snobbery.
Dickens always loved the theatre and was a gifted actor. In middle age he began to give public readings of passages from his own works, as well as from other authors.
In his own lifetime Dickens was extraordinarily popular and he still remains the best-known English novelist. Contemporary critics tend to see his works as combining social realism with the poetical devices of metaphor and symbolism.
Some of the wealth he acquired from his activities he used to found charities to help the poor, especially children, for whom he founded schools. His life was cut short by a stroke in 1870.

Works:
● Setting
Dickens’ novels present a variety of settings, from the countryside and the merry old England through the provincial towns, which figure in most of his stories to the industrial settlements of the North. However, Dickens’ most typical sceneries are those of London. Just as London was the first great metropolis of modern times, so he was the first novelist of life in the metropolis: London life was essential do Dickens’ imagination.
● Art and humour
Dickens’ ability to create dialogue is unmatched by any other English novelist. Hundreds of sayings from his works have passed permanently into the English language.
The main strength of Dickens’ style is his humour, through which he makes the strong points of his novels unforgettable, and also manages to hide, or make more acceptable, his weakness.
● Characters
Dickens’ characters portray a vivid picture of Victorian England. They are mainly from the lower and middle class, and their physical features, ways of dressing and moving, accent are captured by Dickens. Upper class and aristocratic characters are much less well portrayed and tend to fall into stereotypes. A fault frequently found with his characters is that they are too easily divided into good and bad, to the point of becoming almost purely symbolic.
● Plots
As for the plots of his novels, they are all complex. They involve many characters, many parallel stories, plots and subplots, intrigue, often mystery and incredible coincidences.
Texts:
● “Coketown” (from Hard Times)
● “Jacob’s Island” (from Oliver Twist)
The Brontë Sisters
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were the third, fifth and sixth of the six children of an Anglican Priest of Irish descent. The landscape in which the children lived, a small village in the Yorkshire moors, influenced them. It is against this background that both the tragic personal stories of the Brontës and the fictious tragedy of their novels unravel.
Isolation at Haworth (their village) didn’t mean lack of ideas or of literary stimulation. In an environment where the imagination was constantly stimulated by nature, the children created a fantasy world, which to them was as real as the outside one.
After a volume of poems written by all three sisters, the Brontë sisters’ work met with success. They published three novels: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights, by Emily, and Agnes Grey by Anne. In December of 1484 Emily died of consumption, as did Anne a few months later.
● Anne (1820 – 1849)
Her works have been considered as written in the shadow of her more gifted sisters. Recent criticism has begun to recognise that Agnes Grey shows a fine balance between plot, characters, and a clear flowing style.
● Charlotte (1816 – 1855)
Charlotte survived the other two, enjoying a brief spell of popularity and personal happiness after her marriage to an Anglican priest; she died in childbirth in 1855. She was the real driving force behind the publication of the family’s work.
In her best novel, Jane Eyre, Charlotte showed a combination of realistic observation and fine humour with an intensity of feeling and imagination typical of the Romantic Movement.
● Emily (1818 – 1848)
Passion and feelings are at their strongest in Emily’s works. Her poems show a violent impulse to break through life’s conventions, and a desire for a freer world of the spirit; her verses recall the work of Byron and Shelley. The same wild spirit is present in Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only novel and one of the most famous in the English language. In it Emily confronts human passions with the requirements of society.
Texts:
● (From Wuthering Heights)
William Makepeace Thackeray
1811-1863
Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India. He was the son of a high official in the East India Company. Then he was sent to England to be educated there, but those years were miserable for him. Much happier was the period that he spent at Trinity College. Thackeray did not show much inclination to studies or to writing in his juvenile years however, he became a journalist, in London, for some of the best periodicals of the time.
Thackeray was also a talented artist. Many of his articles were accompanied by his own sketches, and he later illustrated his own most famous novels. His The Snobs of England, later published in book form as The Book of Snobs, was serialised in Punch (a famous journal). In it he satirised most of the defects of the British character and of men in general.
Thackeray’s first serious novel, Barry Lindon, is set in the eighteen century, an age that the author always loved and to which he looked back with nostalgia.
His first great novel, Vanity Fair, centres on the adventures of a young woman who makes her way through the world by any possible means.
To his contemporaries Thackeray appeared as a cynical observer of life, and his humour seemed corrosive. His humour in fact diverges from Dickens’ only in being expressed with gentleman-like superiority
Thackeray’s realism today seems stifled by Victorian conventions, as the author himself confessed.
Thackeray rejected the idea that novels should be organised around improbable coincidences of plot, like Dickens’ stories. His real subject was always the lives of ordinary men and women.
Texts:
● “And God Created Snobs” (From The Book of Snobs)
THE LATE VICTORIAN NOVEL
The novel published in the second half of the nineteenth century are clearly different from those of the early Victorian period. The novelists were more interested in the study of their characters’ psychology and in formal problems. Writers as George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy all contributed much to the novel as a genre.
The late Victorian novel featured a tendency towards realism, reacting against Romantic or sentimental visions of man; was also studied the influence of the social environment on man.
Thomas Hardy
1840 – 1928
Hardy was born near Dorchester, in Dorset, a county in southwest England that roughly corresponds to the “Wessex” of his later novels. He was apprenticed to an architect and then went to London to work. There he decided he would be a writer.
He married Emma Gilford in 1874 and the settled near Dorchester, where he was to life for the rest of his life. However, it was rural Dorset that inspired his fiction, with all its historical remains. Hardy reinvented the term “Wessex”, which means ‘land of the West Saxons’.
His first works, as Desperate Remedies, already feature all the elements that would recur in all his later fiction: the setting, an unspoiled countryside peopled by simple folk, and a central theme, love. His next novel, Far from the Madding Crowd was successful enough to enable him to devote himself full time to writing. After this work, Hardy produced twelve other novels, as The Major of Caterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Hardy himself classified them as “Novels of Character and Environment”, to stress the two elements that he thought shaped man’s destiny.
Hardy was often criticised for the pessimism of his novels. His late prose works, Tess and Jude, also earned him accusations of immorality for their nihilism, lack of religious beliefs, and frank treatment of sexual relations.
This hostile reception persuaded Hardy to give up writing fiction and concentrate on poetry: from 1896 he published only verse. After the death of Emma, he married Florence Dugdale and received a series of public honours.

● Themes.
A constant theme is man’s struggle with the indifferent, impersonal forces, both inside and outside himself, which control his life.
Hardy refused any belief in a providential universe. In contrast with the facile Victorian optimism based on progress, Hardy adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer the idea of an “Immanent Will”, a universal power indifferent if not hostile to the fate of man.
Hardy didn’t belong to the Realistic School: for Hardy, the forces at work on man are natural rather than social.
● Language & Style.
Hardy’s novels provide accurate portrayals of rural life, real landscapes and fine reproductions of the Dorset dialect. His style has been seen as uneven (irregular) and his plots as relying too much on improbable or exaggerated events.
● The Cinematic technique.
The so-called “cinematic” novelists anticipated movies, rather than being influenced by them. Novelist cultivated the camera-eye and camera movement, moving into their subjects, from the city into the street, from the streets into the house, etc. it was as if their realism anticipated the cinema. Both novel and film are able to shift their point of view between an “omniscient” or impersonal perspective and the perspective of a particular character without sacrificing realistic illusion.
Among Victorian novelist, Thomas Hardy exploited a freedom within his verbal medium and anticipated the cinema in the choice of some techniques.

Texts:
● “The Woman Pays” (From Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
● “The Cinematique Technique” (From Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
● The last paragraph of Tess of the D’Urbervilles
AESTHETICISM
The term Aestheticism, or the Aesthetic Movement, is used to refer to a movement in the arts, visual and literary, according to which beauty and the sensual pleasures were emphasised and art was used to celebrate them in a highly polished style. This movement spread all over Europe during the last part of the nineteenth century. Its major representatives were on the theoretical side Walter Pater, and on the artistic side Oscar Wilde.
Walter Pater (1839-94) had an extraordinary influence on a whole generation of young writers, including Oscar Wilde. Pater argued that one of life’s pleasures was art, which should not have any moral basis or purpose: it was good in its own right, an end in itself. This is summed up in Gautier’s slogan “l’Art pour l’Art” (Art for Art’s Sake), implying that art was to be free of all moral and didactic restraint. Although Pater did not mean that pleasure had to be immoral, his doctrine was read as a reaction against Victorian standards of morality.
As the century progressed this attitude was taken to extremes by some French writers who came to be called Decadents because of their life-style and ‘immoral’ writings: Baudelaire, Mallarmè, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. These writers were also known as Symbolists.
The Decadents theorised the use of drugs and immersion into any sort of sensual and/or forbidden pleasures.
Oscar Wilde
1854 – 1900
Wilde was born in Dublin, the son of an important surgeon in the city, and of a minor local poet, he was educated at an exclusive school and then went to Trinity College, Dublin before winning a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford.
At Oxford he was immediately attracted to the Aesthetic Movement, as it was elaborated by Walter Pater. The other major influence on him was the art historian and writer John Ruskin, one of his teachers at the university. Wilde quickly won a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist, affected dandy and an aesthete. The kind of insolent, extravagant wit that he cultivated at Oxford later characterised his style as a writer.
After graduating, Wilde moved to London. He assumed extravagant habits, in cloths and behaviour, in contrast with the Victorian background. In 1883 he married Constance Lloyd, who bore him two children, in 1885 and 1886; however, he soon tired of his marriage.
Wilde’s first literary success came in 1890 with a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was both an exhibition of extreme decadentism and a mystery story (as well as an autobiographical work). From 1890 to 1895 Wild embarked on a highly successful career as a writer if light comedies,
Wilde’s social and literary success came to an abrupt end in 1895, when he was arrested and sent to prison with hard labour in Reading because of his homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. His period in prison gave him the inspiration for two of his greatest works; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, on the way prison changes a man, and De Profundis, a long autobiographical letter reflecting on his change of fortunes and the ironies of life and art.
When Wilde left prison in 1897 went to France under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth. In Paris Wilde lived a miserable existence and died alone in a small hotel. He’s buried in the same cemetery as Charles Baudelaire.
Texts:
● The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Preface
VICTORIAN ISSUES: ART AND SOCIAL CRITICISM
The central issue of the age was whether society was to be considered as a spiritual or a mechanical entity. Machines were felt to have changed not only the ways of production but also the ways of life. So many men of culture began to criticize industrialization and its changes.
The most formidable weapon against industrialization was thought to be art, and so it was used to fight the worse aspects of society. Victorian writers and thinkers made the art the ultimate test of all human activity. This was an extension of the Romantic concept of art as the sum of all human experience.
John Ruskin
1819 – 1900
John Ruskin was of Puritan Scottish origin. He was born in London and travelled extensively on the Continent. Ruskin began writing as an art critic: he defended the truth in art opposed to shallow idealism and stale classicism. Ruskin was the first to value the art and architecture of the cities of northern Italy. This interest, first expressed in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, became dominant with The Stones of Venice.
Ruskin formulated the idea that a given form of art is directly related to a given type of society, a whole way of living. His interests ranged from art criticism to social criticism and economics. Ruskin became a sworn enemy to modern mechanised production-line systems. His crusade against materialism against materialism and the lack of beauty and happiness in mechanical work was so thorough that it was considered revolutionary.
Texts:
● “Labour and Civilisation” (from The Stones of Venice)
EARLY VICTORIAN POETRY
Like the Victorian novel, Victorian poetry can be divided in two main phases, an early and a late period. In the years from the accession of Queen Victoria to about 1850 two poets emerged, Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, who were fundamental reference points for the poets of the second half of the century.
Their basic attitude was similar, though their different characteristics: they have moral interests, didactic purpose and were concerned with ethical problems.
Robert Browning
1812 – 1889
Robert Browning was born into a rich family at Camberwell, near London. His father had strong scholarly, literary and artistic interests. Browning was mostly educated at home and was a good reader, though not systematic.
In 1833 he went to Russia, and the following year he visited Italy for the first time, seeing Venice, Florence and Rome. He was a typical upper class Victorian, with hid love of exotic and the picturesque, and his interest for Italian Renaissance.
He only broke social convention once, causing a great stir with his marriage. Browning met his future wife, Elizabeth Barrett, in 1845. She was already famous as a poet. The circumstances were truly Romantic: she was a semi-invalid, six years older than he was, and dominated by her father. Finally, they eloped to Italy in 1846 and lived there for the next fifteen years. Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861.
Browning returned to England to live in London with his son. He took upon himself the role of great poet and became a public figure, known for his conversation and wit.
He died in 1889 in Venice, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

● The Dramatic Monologue.
Browning is the acknowledged master of the dramatic monologue, though strictly speaking he didn’t invent it. The characteristics of his dramatic monologue can be summarised as follows:
- It’s recited by a first-person speaker.
- This speaker is obviously not the poet but a historical figure: a poet or artist, failed lover, saint, etc.
- It’s set in a precise historical and geographical background; many set in the Renaissance and have Italian subjects.
- There’s a listener who usually does or says little but who is essential to the dramatic or theatrical quality of the piece.
- It centres on a crucial point or problem in the speaker’s life.
- The language is made to appear colloquial and spontaneous.
- The use of irregular or unusual punctuation, syntax and rhythm.
● Browning’s philosophy.
In his time Browning was thought to be a profound and original thinker. He developed an idealistic conception of life in which evil was not-being, inaction.
● Browning’s originality.
Browning’s real originality lies in his technical innovations. His unconventional use of language, syntax and metre was to exert a very great influence on early twentieth-century modernist poetry.
Texts:
● My Last Duchess
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806 – 1861
Elizabeth Barrett was born near Durham to a wealthy merchant family that had made its fortunes in slave trade. For a girl of her time she was unusually educated, learning Greek and Latin. She was a good reader and an early writer. Reading and writing were also the only diversions of her life. Her tyrannical father kept her confined at Hope End, the family’s castle. The official excuse for Elizabeth seclusion was her infirmity (she was a semi-invalid).
By the age of thirty-nine Elizabeth was a well-known poetess. As such she sometimes received visits from man of letters and younger writers. One of these was Robert Browning, who soon declared his love for her. Their relation was mainly epistolary for a year and a half, after which they secretly married and eloped to Italy.
The following year she published Sonnets from the Portuguese, inspired by her love for Browning.
Life in Italy brought to Elizabeth both restored health and renewed poetical inspiration. She settled in Florence with her husband at Casa Guidi, recalled in Casa Guidi Windows, 1851, the most famous of her poems inspired by Italian Risorgimento. She died in 1861 and was buried in the English cemetery.
● Moral and social concern.
Her literary interests were always characterized by ethical and social concerns, as the exploitation of children in coalmines and factories (The Cry of the Children). Her best work in this field is now considered Aurora Leigh, concerning wider questions as women’s education and their role in society.
Texts:
● If Thou Must Love Me, Let It Be for Naught.
LATE VICTORIAN POETRY
Late Victorian Poetry to some extent overlaps with the poetry of the early Victorian phase, especially that of Tennyson and Browning. Its most distinct features are:
- Reaction to moral and literary Victorian standards;
- Continuation and modification of Romantic trends;
The seminal movement, in this sense, was the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”, founded in 1848 by the young painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and the sculpture Thomas Woolner, so called because they advocated a return to the purity of late Medieval Italian art, before the stylisation that set in with Raphael and his followers.
Their watchword was “Back to nature!” by which they meant a return to the simplicity tempered with mysticism of the Middle Ages, when spiritual values were held high and mechanisation had not yet destroyed individual creativity.
Pre-Raphaelite painters reacted to the academic style by infusing their work with a note of languorous sensuality and a symbolism, the repetition of certain motifs such as lilies and stars, mainly derived from literary sources such as Dante’s Vita Nuova.
The Pre-Raphaelites also believed in great technical ability as an antidote to superficiality of feeling and expression. They were obsessed with the detailed reconstruction of reality.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844 – 1889
Hopkins was born at Startford, Essex, the eldest son of nine children. At Balliol College, Oxford, he became associated with the Oxford Movement and its program of religious reform.
He was received into the Catholic Church in 1866 and then entered the Jesuit Order. He was ordained a priest in 1877, and worked in many parishes. He became Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, a post he held until his death.
Hopkins’s position in the history of English literature is rather unusual. His poetry was completely unknown in his lifetime because he refused to publish it, or even admit that he wrote verse. He thought that his interest in poetry conflicted with his vocation as a priest, and would distract him from his duties. However, his superiors encouraged him to write and paint.
The first edition of his poems, edited by a friend and fellow poet, appeared in 1918, thirty years after his dead. Hopkins was immediately perceived as a man born before his time, a twentieth-century poet in an earlier age that couldn’t have appreciated the modernity of his talent.
Hopkins’ poetry, however, is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century as well as in the tradition of English devotional writing. In his personal way he was still a late Romantic and his mystical and sensual vein stems directly from Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites.
Most of Hopkins’ poetry is religious, either because it directly praises to God or because he constantly sees and celebrates God in nature. The physical world is full of God’s presence; man shouldn’t interfere with it as little as possible and feel the joy it freely gives. He was convinced that industrial and mechanical world was not only ugly but also the product of man’s sins.
Hopkins was contrary to the smooth and fluent rhythm prevailing in nineteenth-century poetry and tried to model his metres on what he believed was the common rhythm of spoken English. To pursue this he invented a metrical system that he called “sprung rhythm”. By this he meant a stress-based metre where each line of verse is based on a regular number of stresses, or primary accents, and not of syllables, which can vary in number.
Hopkins also invented a terminology of his own. Its two main terms are:
- Inscape: the distinct pattern of each thing in the universe, giving it its individuality.
- Instress: the property to recognise the ‘inscape’ of each thing. In a general sense, this is the quality that distinguishes man as the highest being in the universe.
Texts:
● The Windhover
Thomas Hardy as a Poet
From 1896 Thomas Hardy published only verse. He wrote some 900 poems during his life, and they echo many of the situations and themes that are found in his novels, though they are less tragical and serious: in the poems there’s hope and irony.
They are extremely varied in forms, including narrative ballads, folksongs, anecdotes, and lyrics. A distinctive group of poems is about his dead wife, Emma. (Poems of 1912-13)
Texts:
● In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
● The Convergence of the Twain – (Lines on the loss of the «Titanic»)

THE MODERN AGE
POETRY
THE WAR POETS
Rupert Brooke
1887 - 1915
Rupert Brooke, born in a high-class family, was educated at Rugby school and then at King’s College, Cambridge. He became Officer in the Royal Navy and then wrote the ‘war sonnets’ that made his fame: The Soldier was even read by the Dean of St Paul’s from the pulpit.
He represented the patriotic side of the war poetry: he saw the importance of the fight for a good cause.
He died of an infection in Greece.
Texts:
● The Soldier
This is Brooke’s most famous poem, it was written during the first phase of the war, when patriotism and old heroic ideals had not yet died. It does not describe anything precise, but only presents a vague generalization of the “war, self - sacrifice, glory” equation, which so deeply affected the young people of those first years.
The form itself (classical Petrarcan sonnet with a regular rhyme pattern) reflects an abstract view of the war, with no hint at actual horrors or at death, except for the death of the poet himself who, in his romantic idealization, pretends that the earth of the “foreign field” where he lies will be “for ever England”.
Siegfried Sassoon
1886 – 1967
Siegfried Sassoon was born in a rich Jewish family: he didn’t share the same religion of the other soldier (and poets). During the war he was wounded and hospitalised in Britain; he refused to go back to the front and denounced the war’s horrors. He eventually returned to the front but was wounded again and invalidated home.
His war poetry shows both his great courage and his hatred of war: he became a pacifist and wrote satirical anti-war poems.
Texts:
● Glory of Women
It Is a Petrarchan sonnet made up of self-contained stanzas. Focus is here on “reported war” and on the way people at home, under the impact of propaganda, visualize the war. The two quatrains are in general addressed to women who idealize their men, and turn them into heroes surrounded by a sort of romantic. Stress is on such words as “decoration”, “chivalry”, “delight”, “fondly” and “ardours”, contrasted, though ironically, with the paradox “you make us shells”. Though indirectly, Sassoon describes the horrors of war, with the “heroes” panic-struck and trampling, in their inglorious retreat, even the corpses of their companions. The tragic realism is purposely contrasted with the “dreaming” of the German mother; she, however, sharing the same hopes and despair as other English mothers, becomes the symbol of all mothers whose sons, involved in the same tragic ordeal, are united in a sort of brotherhood that transcends all barriers of nationality.
Isaac Rosenberg
1890 – 1918
Isaac Rosenberg’s best poetry resulted from his war experience. He enlisted in 1915 and was killed in action in 1918, thus suffering life in the trenches and the nightmare of military attacks. His poetry is highly originally in rhythm and diction. Like Owen’s, it conveys the horror of war through crude, realistic details but it is also filled with pity and human sympathy. His work poetry is more intimate and private, more symbolic and imaginative than that of his fellow poets.
Texts:
●Break of Day in the Trenches
Dawn breaks on the front, without idyllic or romantic overtones, though at the beginning of this poem Isaac Rosenberg would like to believe that it is the same eternal dawn of all times. When the soldier poet reaches out for a poppy growing on the edge of the trench, a rat leaps over his hand. He feels the irony of the situation. Strong, clever, civilised men are stuck in the trenches, this rat is free to cross the fields between the enemies’ lines, and perhaps it will touch a German’s hand soon. Probably the rat will see the terror in the men’s eyes, and it will feel their hearts beating. The poem closes on the poppy metaphor once more: only the poppy behind the poet’s ear is safe for the time being.
Wilfred Owen
1893 – 1918
One of the most significant war poets was Wilfred Owen. He caught trench fever on the Somme and was hospitalised in Edinburgh; during this period he met and was deeply influenced by Sigfried Sassoon. He went back to fight in France in 1918, was decorated for bravery and was then killed on the Sombre Canal one week before the Armistice was signed.
His poems are remarkable for the way that physical detail conveys a vision of horror and apocalyptic desolation.
Texts:
● Dulce et Decorum Est
This is Owen’s statement of the horror of war and the hypocrisy and ignorance of patriotism. The central part of the poem deals with the terrible new chemical weapon of World War I: gas. The scene is relived as a nightmare, with men drowning in a green sea of gas.
The soldier poet emerges from the awful reality of the last part, where he follows the wagon carrying dead or dying bodies. He asks the reader to come along and see for himself the ugly face of death. Horace’s famous Latin tag is bitterly ironic
William Butler Yeats
1865 – 1939
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family; this fact was very important, because usually “Irishness” was connected with Catholicism. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter, and this influenced William’s education and his first artistic experiences.
His first works were influenced by the so-called ‘Celtic Revival’: he was interested by the old Celtic tradition and mythology. Another important source of inspiration was William Blake. He later was also involved in the revival of Irish Theatre.
In 1889 he met the beautiful Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne and immediately fell in love with her (She refused to marry him several times). After an American tour, Yeats met another decisive figure in his life, the London-based American poet Ezra Pound.
Yeats, who was an Anglo-Irish, had never got involved in Irish politics, despite his interest in Irish nationalism, but he suddenly experienced political enthusiasm with the Easter Risings of 1916. The following year, having been refused yet again by Maud Gonne, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who later bore him two children.
His wife, who was a spiritualist medium, convinces Yeats that was possible to be in contact with the spirit world. The result was his prose work A Vision, where he assumes that everything in the world is interrelated: history, theology, art, and biography.
Yeats sees history as formed by a series of opposite cycles, each cycle lasting about 2.000 years. Each age is the opposite of the previous one. Each cycle has a circular development, like a climbing spiral, or gyre. This theory is represented by a cone penetrating another cone, the point of the cone touching the base of the previous one. The gyre symbolizes the course of both mankind and history.
Texts:
● The Second Coming
Thomas Stearns Eliot
1888 – 1965
Thomas S. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, into a family of English descent. Eliot went to Harvard in 1906, where he became acquainted with Indian philosophy, which later influenced his major works. After gaining is M.A. (Master of Arts) degree, he went to the Sorbonne in Paris. In France he began to read the work of the French Symbolists, as Jules Laforgue. He then travelled to Germany, where he continued to study literature and philosophy. At the outbreak of World War I, he was obliged to leave Germany and went to Oxford to study Greek philosophy. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a ballet dancer and a writer. The meeting with Ezra Pound, the leading Modernist in London, was decisive for Eliot. The years 1915-25 were a great strain to Eliot, due to money problems, his work in a bank, poor relations with his wife and his own nervous instability. During this time he finished the first draft of The Waste Land.
The Waste Land is considered as the most important poem of this century. It expresses the modern artist’s disillusion with the modern world and, at the same time, his need and search for a new tradition. It also represents the culmination of the first phase in Eliot’s career, which may be called pessimistic or even nihilistic.
Eliot’s way out of nihilism was religion. He gradually accepted the Christian faith and this reached its culmination with Four Quartets.
Eliot’s sources:

- He learned from the Imagists, Pound in particular, the necessity for clear and precise language and images.
- From the French Symbolist Eliot took free verse.
- He was deeply influenced by John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, whom he helped to re-evaluate.
- Perhaps the single greatest influence in Eliot was Dante. In his Divina Commedia Dante shown that the poet could express a complete range of emotions.
- Other important sources were mythology, Shakespeare’s works and popular tradition.
Texts:
● from The Waste Land

The Waste Land is perhaps the central work in the modernist tradition, and not only for its content.
● The structure
The structure is modernist, its five unequal sections showing no logical continuity. The lines very in length and rhythm, and would seem to be a form of free verse, although there are some regularities and rhymes.
● The contents.
The poem is divided into five sections:
The Burial of the Dead opens with the coming of spring as a “cruel thing”. Here is expressed the fundamental contrast of the poem, between aridity and fertility. Traditional myths and symbols are used in an original way and acquire different connotations (for instance the traditional positive connotation of spring is reversed). The setting is London, seen from the point of view of the Waste Land (the “Unreal City”), and there are some real topographical elements.
A Game of Chess examines the theme of cultural and emotional sterility in two different contexts, one upper class and the other lower class. The image of the game of chess is used to express the opposition of the characters.
The scene opens in a rich house, a little baroque, which is widely described. We don’t know if the woman’s speech is a monologue or a conversation; however, it express the lack of communication of modern society.
Then the scene moves to a pub, where a woman is talking about a friend of hers, Lil, who has problems with her husband and is not happy with her life. The situation is different: there’s a real conversation and people do act, but it betrays lack of love and emotions all the same.
The Fire Sermon is influenced by oriental philosophy, Buddhist in particular. The central episode is the seduction of a London typist by a City clerk, typical of modern sex without love and without communication. The central figure is that of Tiresias, the Theban blind prophet, who embodies both sexes.
Death by Water introduces the idea of purification by water using images of drowning
What the Thunder Said unites all the themes and motifs of the poem. The poem ends with the words of an Upanishad, a poetic commentary on the Hindu scriptures.
Wystan Hugh Auden
1907 – 1973
Wystan Auden was born in York and educated at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was seen as one of the ‘progressive poets’ of the 1930s. These writers held left-wing views, or indeed openly Marxist, and were concerned with social problems. Auden spent time travelling; he lived for some time in pre-Hitler Berlin, sharing rooms with Christopher Isherwood (he was a declared gay). Auden also went to Spain in 1937, during the civil war, to serve as an ambulance driver on the republican side. The experience was in many ways traumatic for him, due to the horrors of the war. In 1937 he married Erika Mann, daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, to give her British nationality so that she could escape from Nazi Germany. In 1938 he went to China with Isherwood to follow the China-Japan war. In 1939 he and Isherwood went to live in America, when the war broke out. In 1946 Auden became an American citizen. However, he never lost contact with Europe: he died in Vienna in 1973.
Texts:
● Refugee Blues
This is a poem about a political refugees and is in the form of a blues song. Its subject is the Jews who in 1939 had to flee from Germany because of Nazi persecution. Here is built an analogy of the jews with all suffering and persecuted races in history. Death is present throughout, and the poem ends with the image of the soldiers looking for the Jews.
Dylan Thomas
1914 – 1953
Dylan Thomas came from South Wales and much of his works reflects his early life and experiences there. He began to write poetry while at school and worked as a journalist, broadcaster and film-maker. He quickly gained a reputation for his hard drinking and bohemian life. His talent and his personality were much appreciated in the United States
● Themes:
- Nature is seen as a sacred external entity. His feelings and descriptions of nature caused him to be called a new Romantic.
- Connected with the previous theme, the close connection between death and life.
- An idealisation of childhood.
- The horrors of war. Thomas was deeply shocked by German air raids on London.
Texts:
● And Death Shall Have No Dominion
This poem, dedicated to his father and taken from his most famous collection, Twenty-five Poems, shows us how meditation on death is seen by the poet. Though using Bible’s language and rhythms (the phrase “And Death shall have no dominion” is modelled on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in the New Testament), the poem is not religious in a confessional sense. The many strong images of violent and natural death are rhythmically swept aside by this repeated affirmation of faith in life.

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