lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYwere more gifted and artistic representatives of thesame taste for the sentimental and edifying. Unlesswe remember this we shall fail to understand the revoltin the sixties of Arnold and Rossetti and Morris andSwinburne and others against the taste poetic andartistic of their age. Tennyson and Browning couldbe sentimental in a way that to some readers is astrying as the simplesse, the " silly sooth," of Wordsworthor the occasional vulgarity of Keats.But indeed, until we disengage ourselves from theimpression of Tennyson and Browning as great philosophicalpoets, which was the conviction of their lateradmirers, we shall fail to do justice to what they bothundoubtedly were—very great and cunning artists invery different yet complementary ways, who enrichedthe whole compass of English poetry and not least thelyrical poetry which they took over from their morepassionately inspired predecessors.The younger Tennyson of the successive volumes—Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Poems (1833), and Poems.By Alfred Tennyson. 2 vols. (1842)—was not burdenedby any such message as inspired the lyrics of Blakeand Wordsworth, nor were his early songs the vehicleof any such intense personal feeling as Shelley's songshad been from the time he wrote " Away, the moor isdark" to the last Dirge he composed:Rough wind that moanest loud,Grief too sad for song ;Wild wind, when sullen cloudKnells all the night long ;Sad storm whose tears are vain,Bare woods whose branches strain,Deep caves and dreary main—Wail for the world's wrong.66