lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

ARNOLD AND PRE-RAPHAELITE GROUPtendency of the romantic revival from the first imitationof the old ballads, and the spurious Middle Englishpoems of Chatterton, attained to its most completemanifestation—the revival of old moods and old modes,the playing (as one might put it) at being a mediaevalpoet of love or Catholic devotion, a Greek poet,lyrical or tragic. It is, of course, a sophisticatedreproduction in which modern feeling is subtly blendedwith or disguised in an antique fashion. Of the propheticstrain in the poetry of the earlier romantics,Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, or the didactic strain inTennyson and Browning, there is nothing—or nothingreally effective—in the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites.Art was their religion. Of the elements that are combinedin the complex effect of a poem—thought (whatthe poem states); the colour given by the words thepoet uses, the syntax of his sentences and his imagery;lastly the rhythm, the melody, and harmony of hisverse, the tendency of romantic poetry had been tolay more and more stress upon the last three—colour,imagery, harmony—at the expense of the first, whichthe eighteenth-century poets had always regarded asthe core and justification of the whole. "Poetry,"Johnson said, "is the art of uniting pleasure with truth,by calling imagination to the help of reason.'' TheVanity of Human Wishes, The Deserted Village, theOde on a Distant Prospect of Eton College are all poemsthat make a definite statement which the poetrydecorates and enforces. But the thought of even theprophetic poems of Blake or Wordsworth or Shelleyis suggested rather than stated, is mystical, an attemptto define a mood which transcends clear thinking.And in the work of poets less burdened with a messageto deliver, colour and imagery and music are the poet's101