lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

TENNYSON, BROWNING, & SOME OTHERSIVTENNYSON, BROWNING, AND SOMEOTHERSTHE simple, sentimental lyric had abundant vogueduring the years when, it must be remembered, Shelleyand Keats were still undiscovered, and their greatsuccessors, the Dioscuri of the earlier Victorian age,were only making their slow way to recognition andpopularity, Mrs Hemans, L. E. L., Thomas HaynesBailey, Robert Montgomery, and others represent,better than the greater poets, the taste of the earlyVictorian age,—middle-class, pious, sentimental. Astudy of their work belongs rather to social than toliterary history. It was against poetry of this bourgeois,sentimental kind in Holland that a number ofyoung men in the eighties made a vehement protest,declaring that poetry was not sentiment and sermonsbut art and passion. We were more fortunate in thepossession of great poets whose work, as it graduallymade itself felt, dispelled the influence of this inferiorstuff without the necessity of an active crusade andthe foundation of such a periodical as De Nieuwe Gidsto make the appeal effective. Yet it is well to recallwhat was the taste of the period in poetry as in otherthings, for the poet who wrote Lady Clara Vere deVere and The May Queen made throughout his lifeconcessions to the taste of his audience, and so in hisway did the less popular author of Pippa Passes andThe Blot in the 'Scutcheon and Colombe's Birthday, and,shall we say, even The Ring and the Book; and MrsBrowning and the " Spasmodics " Smith and Dobell,65 5