Transcript Document
English 1060
Victorian Poetry
Poetry
Queen Elizabeth reigned 1558-1603, but her period was so influential that the Elizabethan style of poetry extends into the mid-1600s.
• Love sonnet • Pastoral • Allegorical epic • Aristocratic
Sonnets
Petrarchan Sonnet (Popularized by Francesco Petrarch, 1304-74): 14 lines Octave: 8 lines (a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a) Sestet: 6 lines (c-d-e, c-d-e) English / Shakespearean Sonnet: 14 lines 3 verses: (a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f) Couplet: (g-g) Period of popularity: 1500-1688
Themes
Elaborate, sophisticated vocabulary: artifice, not naturality (also in music) Love: Forbidden love, young love, poems of pleading Aristocratic and classical / heroic subjects Startling, extreme, or sexual comparisons or imagery : Poems written in court circles for promotions, patrons, or royal favor : Poems generally written by aristocrats for small audiences : Devotional and religious poems
Elizabethan poetry ends
Restoration 1688 In 1688, Dutch rulers William & Mary were asked to rule over England with reduced powers. With the decline in court power, the rise of urban wealth, a culture exhausted by religious wars, and an intellectual elite becoming more interested in scientific issues (The Enlightenment), the courtly and aristocratic ideals of Elizabethan poetry went out of fashion and were replaced by novels, essays, satire, and early newspapers as popular forms of literature.
Romanticism 1794-1837
Romanticism is in some ways a rejection both of the coldness of enlightenment technology and the industrial revolution, and of the chaos of the French Revolution.
In popular culture there is a new appreciation for nature, human emotions, and humanism. Although romanticism is not a religious movement, the period sees a religious revival.
Romanticism
German painter Caspar David Friedrich: “the artist’s feeling is his law.” English poet William Wordsworth: poetry should be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Much of German Romanticism led to a reawakening of feelings of nationalism and emotional desires for recapturing a lost, primitive Germanic identity rooted in nature.
Victorian England 1837-1901
Beloved Queen Victoria reigned over the height of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, when its huge wealth, trade, and industrial power ruled the world. Along with Elizabethan England, it was a sort of second golden age of English wealth, culture, arts, and literature.
Victorian England 1837-1901
…Unless you were poor. As public farm lands were closed off and people came to cities to find industrial jobs, living standards for the poor involved dangerous and insecure work at low wages, dirt, and poverty.
Victorian Values: Respectability!
Or not…
The Victorian era has a stereotype of being prudish and sexually repressed, so much so that “Victorian” is now used as an adjective for this meaning. In fact, religious ideals of family respectability coexisted with confident, adult themes in art, photography, and literature.
Victorian Poetry
Victorian poetry was mostly a continuation and expansion of Romantic ideas of nature and emotion with more experimentalism, religious skepticism, and sophistication.
Poetic Themes
• Religious doubt and shock after Darwinian theory (Tennyson, Arnold) • Sensual, idealized imagery; religious and classical symbolism (Rosetti, Browning, Hopkins) • Poetry inspired by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ style of painting, which emphasized symbolic and idealized feeling over realism • Freer and looser poetic meter and lineation
Elizabethan Poetry Line/meter bound (sonnet) – Written for small noble audiences – Themes: faith, seize the day, extreme comparisons Restoration Poetry Patriotic, Pious, Cynical Romantic Poetry Emotional, natural, plain-spoken, reaction to industrialism Victorian Poetry Emotional, freer meter, sentimental, nostalgic, playful