routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Victorian poetry
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I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw;
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth – I hope, like you –
On the handle of a skeleton gold key;
I cut mine on a leek, which I eat it every week;
I’m a clerk at thirty bob as you can see.
. . .
It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
At about the same time that Tennyson was returning to Arthurian myth
for his subject matter, a new movement in art and literature was setting
about a revolution against the ugliness of contemporary life. The Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood – as they called themselves when their work first
appeared at the Royal Academy – stressed their admiration for the Italian
art of the period before the High Renaissance (which Raphael, who died
in 1520, was taken as symbolising). A mediaeval simplicity, a closeness to
nature in representational clarity, and a deep moral seriousness of intent
distinguish the Brotherhood, of whom the main figures were the painters
John Millais and William Holman Hunt, and the brothers Dante Gabriel
and William Michael Rossetti. Dante Gabriel was a painter first, but became
well known as a poet; William Michael edited the group’s periodical, The
Germ, which published four issues in 1850, originally with the significant
subtitle Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art.
Nature for the Pre-Raphaelites is different from the nature of the
Romantics or of Tennyson: there is a mysticism in, for example, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel (1850) which uses lilies and a
white rose for essentially symbolic purposes. This symbolism, and a
concern with generalities of life, love, and death, permeates Rossetti’s
verse for some thirty years, but his writing also carries an erotic charge
which is new in Victorian verse, and led to accusations of obscenity
when it was identified as ‘the Fleshly School of Poetry’. Here is an
example from The Blessed Damozel: