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Victorian Poetry

Chapter 20: Chapter VI Conclusion
By John Drinkwater
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About This Book

This study surveys Victorian-era poetry, examining prevailing manners and materials and identifying characteristic diction and tonal tendencies. It analyzes major figures such as Tennyson and Browning and traces their differing influences on contemporaries including Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris. Chapters address the poets’ technical choices, the problems posed by changing intellectual fashions, and the tension between subjective lyric, narrative and dramatic modes. It also considers recurring themes—occasional and love poetry, the Victorian use of nature, spiritual expression, and debates about moral judgment and public authority in poetic form.

Chapter VI
Conclusion

Nothing is vainer than for criticism of poetry to suppose that it can give anything of the pleasure to be found in poetry itself. In making these notes about Victorian poetry, and in reading over again the work of the masters who wrote it, I am acutely aware how dismally inadequate any commentary upon such work must be. I am aware, also, that one could confront every generalisation that one makes with some modifying example; I have, for instance, since saying what I did about the love poetry of by-gone ages, been haunted by Bishop King’s exquisitely personal and touching Exequy on his “dead saint.” But these exercises have their times, and they are at least an occasion for refreshing memories that are apt to become a little dulled even for the most loyal and industrious of us. Further, abstract theorising about art at least does the art no harm and may sometimes serve it. No one is likely to read the Morte d’Arthur or the Garden of Proserpine or the Scholar Gipsy or Pippa Passes with any more poetic delight for anything that he may find in this essay, but here and there a friendly mind may get a little pleasure of a real though less essential kind in considering for a moment, apart from the fundamental things of poetry that persist from one generation to another, what were the characteristics that distinguished an age, of which these are representative creations, from the other ages with which it has now taken an equal and immortal place.