lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYand fieicer ferment of ideas than one is aware of in anybut one or two of the romantic poets, in Goethe, inBlake, in Wordsworth, in Keats perhaps, but mainlyin his letters, and Keats's thought and poetry wereonly touching maturity when the blind Fury slit "thethin-spun Life." The greater body of romanticpoetry was inspired by ideas of a rather superficialcharacter or very vaguely conceived:—Byron's moodof passionate protest against everything in heaven andearth; Shelley's dreams of earthly Utopias which areinconceivable and can only be sung about; Scott'sbuckram medievalism, for what is greatest in Scottis all that he has in common with the eighteenthcenturynovelists—his grasp of the real life and characterwhich underlie all trappings historical or local; Landor'sHellenism; Beddoes' Elizabethanism; and it is hardlynecessary to dwell on the still more superficial moodsof Moore and Milman and Montgomery and MrsHemans. Nor is it very different with the periodthat followed. The exquisite art of Tennyson hasnot disguised to his own age, still less to ours, thecomparative poverty of his thought. He feels deeply,and he writes with a wealth of colour and melody thatno depreciation can discredit, but he has left no recordor interpretation of human nature and human destinysuch as can give him a place with the greatest—withHomer or Æschylus, Lucretius or Virgil or Dante.And Browning, the active and alert-minded Browning,have all his intellectual and metrical gymnastics, hisdramatic curiosities, left us with a really deeper impressionthan Tennyson of life and character ? Arnoldhimself felt the need of ideas in poetry, but into hisown poetry he could put nothing but his melancholy.The Pre-Raphaelites abandoned the task and made8