THE VICTORIAN AGE,THE VICTORIAN POETS,THE VICTORIAN POETRY, THE VICTORIAN AGE in literature

 THE VICTORIAN POETS: 

A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE In the last block we read some of the Romantic poets; the poetry of an age of revolutions. "The formal doctrines of the Romanticists' wrote Legouis and Cazamian, 'had never been officially recognized; to the end, they had been öpposed by conservative opinion, and their disputed triumph was rather a question of fact than of rights.' In this block you are going to read a selection of the poetry of the British Isles at the height of its imperial glory. This age has been named after Queen Victoria who sat on the throne of England from 1837 to 1901. She was the sixth and the last monarch of the House of Hanover. Victoria was succeeded by Edward VII (1901- 10) of the House of Saxe-Coburg and George V (1910- 36) of the House of Windsor. Accordingly some historians of English literature talk about the Victorian, the Edwardian and, the Georgian periods in English literature.

 Funny as it may appear, the Victorian period symbolises growth and stability on the one hand, poverty, ugliness, squalor and injustice, especially among the urban industrial workers, on the other. Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 81) a British politician, prime minister and novelist contrasted the conditions of the rich and the poor in his trilogy, especially the second novel in the series: Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847). 

This divide in the society which saw prosperity and progress on the one hand and poverty and ugliness on the other. moralism and philanthropy on the one hand and capitalistic greed and corruption on the other is often referred to as Victorian Compromise". We can observe the social divide in the novels also of Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Thomas Hardy and, Mary Ann Evans who wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot. The period 1901 - 14 is often called the Edwardian age. It is commonly used to contrast with the Victorian period. This was the age of H.G Wells, Armold Bennet and John Galsworthy, It is said that Queen Victoria sat on the throne like a great paper-weight and after her death things blew all over the place. The image gives expression to the sense of freedom going hand in hand with the lack of direction that characterizes the age. 

The other aspect of the Edwardian age is the cheering prosperity and quiet confidence that the empire gave to the English people, especially as it preceded the First World War (19914 - 18). Georgian Poetry was a series of five volumes of poems edited by Edward Marsh. The project was conceived as a harbinger of a new age of nature poetry like those of the Romantie period. Some of the poets who found their poems published in the early volumes were W. H. Davies, John Masefield, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Lascelles Abererombie, Gordon Bottomley and John Drinkwater. Among the poets in the later volumes were poets such as Edmund Blunclen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Isaac Rosenberg. However, on the whole. Georgian poetry acquired the image of work of an escapist nature. When we talk about Victorian poetry we generally think of the poetries of Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold who were in some ways part of the English.