第十二讲 The Victorian Poetry Tennyson.pptVIP

* Victorian Poetry 1. The Development of Victorian Poetry * The beginning of the Victorian period: a halt in English poetry the ending of the last period in which poetry dominated the imaginative literature a. The death of all the great Romantics except Wordsworth who had lost his poetic power; b. The wavering of poetry’s dominating status in the 18th C. (but the confusion of the French revolution caused emotional disturbance of a kind that poetry was better fitted than prose to resolve); c. Practical logic ( the hard reason of the political economists): dominating the age that focused on accomplishing concrete ends therefore diminished the public demand for poetry; d. Influence of the Industrial revolution: the middle-class focusing on gaining wealth while the working classes seek practical remedies for their hardships; e. Human imagination finding satisfaction in the novel. * The function of the poet: to sweeten the present by a nostalgia for the past that was, or seemed, free of worries; * Influences from the Romantics: a. Tennyson Browning are called by some “the Third Generation of Romantics”; b. Keats’ influence on Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris Hopkins // Shelley’s influence on Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, Hardy Yeats; c. Difference: Victorian poetry is no longer regular in form meter, its allusions to nature become more scientific than romantic; * The seven (eight) poets in the Victorian age: the Big Three: Tennyson, Browning Arnold; the Small Three: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris Algernon Charles Swinburne (the Pre-Raphaelites); Thomas hardy Gerard M. Hopkins; * The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood a. A movement of painters poets (more important in painting than in poetry) that began just before 1850; b. Opposition to technical skill without inspira