routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Victorian poetry
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Vitae Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) – ‘Play up! play
up! and play the game!’ – has been severely mocked for the ‘publicschool’
ethos it embodies, but this way of thinking is central to the
concepts of duty and conduct of the Victorian empire-builders. No less
a figure than the Duke of Wellington is credited with the affirmation
that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. This
shows how central the public-school ethos was to the whole age.
It is remarkable that Tennyson turned, both at the beginning and at
the height of his career, to the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table as a source of inspiration. Malory had used the myth
in Le Morte D’Arthur as England endured the Wars of the Roses, and
Milton had thought of writing an English epic after the Civil War and
the Commonwealth, before turning to the more universal myth of the
Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost.
This recourse to the most potent English national myth at times of
crisis is interesting in its wish to affirm English nationalism, history, and a
sense of national identity. Idylls of the King incorporates Tennyson’s Morte
d’Arthur from 1833 in a series of poems covering the whole tale of Arthur
and Guinevere, through romance and chivalry, to adultery, denunciation,
and the end of the kingdom, with the great sword Excalibur cast into the
lake. The ‘moral’ is one of change; not just change and decay, however:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new.
(Tennyson, Idylls of the King)
What sets Tennyson apart as a major poet is his capacity to bring
together sound and sense, mood and atmosphere, to make an appeal
to the emotions of the reader.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some divine despair.
(Tears, idle tears)
His is emotive rather than intellectual poetry, only naming the ‘divine
despair’ rather than investigating or challenging it, as Gerard Manley
Hopkins was to do. It was perhaps inevitable that his poetry should fall
from its high regard in the general reaction against Victorianism during