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Victorian poetry
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and She, 1887) and the Ruritanian fantasies of Anthony Hope (The
Prisoner of Zenda, 1894). In their works, the stiff-upper-lip ethic triumphs
over all sorts of devilish plots in the exotic locales of another ‘outside’.
VICTORIAN POETRY
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
(Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach)
Victorian poetry is generally considered to be in the shadow of the popular
genre of the novel: a reversal of the situation in the Romantic age, and
largely due to the success of the novels of Walter Scott, who transferred
his energies from poetry to the novel in 1814. Victorian poetry is, however,
of major importance, and the most popular poet of the age, Alfred (later
Lord) Tennyson, is as much a representative figure as Dickens.
In Memoriam A.H.H. is the key work of Tennyson; a series of closely
linked but separate poems, it is, in effect, an elegy on the death of a close
friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson
worked on the poem between 1833 and 1850, and it was published
anonymously in 1850. Its publication appropriately marks a central point
in nineteenth-century sensibilities, and the note of doubt and despair of
In Memoriam matched the tone of the times perfectly, in the very year in
which the first of the great Romantics, William Wordsworth, died.
In Memoriam became hugely popular, especially with Queen Victoria
after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861. Its melancholy
tone, not without a degree of self-pity, became a keynote of late
Victorian taste and sentiment:
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Such melancholy is sometimes reinforced in poems such as The Lady
of Shallot by a background of mediaeval legend, in which a dreamlike
atmosphere of brooding tragedy is created.