English and American Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction

The literary nineteenth century is commonly divided into periods or phases, more or less arbitrarily. There was clearly a Romantic period in England from about 1786 to 1832, followed by a more sedate Victorian reaction that itself began to disintegrate after 1860. American literature remained minor and derivative until about 1820, when William Cullen Bryant emerged. While the 1830’s were comparable on both sides of the Atlantic, with significant interaction, Romanticism lasted longer in America—to which it was more applicable. The traumatic American Civil War of 1861 to 1865, however, soon drew American letters toward the increasing pessimism already common in England. During the last third of the nineteenth century, British and American literature were widely separate, and the uniqueness of American writers was generally acknowledged. Nevertheless, the two literatures were deeply interdependent at the beginning of the century, with Britain’s dominating, as the young United States of America were less united than a collection of states with strong ties to Britain and the Continent.

Despite its geographical separation from England, the East Coast of what is now the United States was very strongly British during the eighteenth century, not only politically but also culturally. The American Revolution (1776-1783), which justified itself on grounds derived primarily from British thought, changed nothing in that respect, for though American writers such as John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, and Philip Freneau soon turned toward American subjects, they continued to see them through British eyes and to imitate British literary models, which were still of the neoclassical type. Neoclassicism was appropriate to a society in which religious and social values were well assured and stability was more evident than change. However, this stability was vanishing rapidly throughout the latter eighteenth century, in both England and America.

Political, economic, and social revolutions

It was an era of revolutions, through which much that has since characterized the West came into being. Not all of these revolutions were sudden or dramatic, but their cumulative force was irresistible. For example, population increased enormously throughout the latter eighteenth century in England and the United States as better sanitation, nutrition, and medicine increased longevity and reduced infant mortality. This larger and healthier population strained available resources, pressured an outmoded economic system, and gave both countries unusually large numbers of the young, who used the increasing availability of books to effect political, agricultural, technological, scientific, and social revolutions on behalf of the abundance and freedom with which their own interests were identified.

Two of the most obvious revolutions were political, as the United States broke away from England in 1776 and France attempted to discard its outmoded monarchy and religious establishment in 1789. Less precipitously, agriculture was revolutionized by the development of improved plows, crop rotation schemes, selective breeding, and (in England) an improved network of canals and turnpikes that allowed farmers to market specialty crops over greater distances. The superior transportation of the latter eighteenth century was also broadly effective in extending the boundaries of urban culture beyond London to provincial and even rural centers, so that authorship (for example) was more widespread. As mail service improved, men of letters everywhere corresponded more meaningfully, and even American colonials such as Benjamin Franklin were effective participants in the European ferment. Other aspects of technological change were also rapid, as both England and the United States responded ever more fully to the development of mechanical power. The steam engine, developed by James Watt, inaugurated the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, which would then transform the two countries for a second time during the nineteenth century with the advent of railroads and steamships; these latter inventions made the territorial ambitions of Britain and the United States—Britain’s, beyond its shores, and America’s, toward the west—feasible. The factory system, with its emphasis on regulated labor and standardized parts, was not only of economic and social importance—it strongly influenced nineteenth century literature and thought as well. Prior to the American Revolution, however, because British law prevented the full development of American manufacture (finished goods had to be imported from England), much colonial ingenuity was devoted instead to improved nautical technology—at which New England quickly became outstanding—and eventually to exploring the resources of the constantly retreating western frontier.

The sea, the frontier, and foreign countries attracted young adventurers who would otherwise have been victimized by the economic inequities of hereditary wealth. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution fostered a new entrepreneurial class that gained both economic and social prominence. These aggressive and often uncouth opportunists challenged the increasingly moribund landed aristocracies of England and the United States, wresting a larger share of political power and social respectability for themselves. If the eighteenth century was, at its beginning, dominated by hereditary nobility, its internal conflicts gave rise to a nineteenth century in which an aristocracy of talent was more important.

The internal conflicts of the eighteenth century derived in large part from a crosscurrent of ideas known as the Enlightenment, which originated in seventeenth century England with Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton, then spread during the next hundred years to France, where ideals of cosmopolitan urbanity, rational humanism, and religious toleration (if not outright disbelief) were popularized by Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all of whom advocated freedom and change. A second eighteenth century center of Enlightenment initiative was Scotland (then experiencing a nationalistic revival), which contributed the skepticism of David Hume, the economic theories of Adam Smith, and an impressive series of historiographic, scientific, technological, and literary achievements. The American phase of the Enlightenment, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, guided restless colonials toward independence, economic self-sufficiency, and a radically new theory of government. However, both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were based on Enlightenment ideals that derived in large part from those of Republican Rome.

Influence of the past

Nineteenth century minds never forgot their indebtedness to the past, and one of the most reliable characteristics of nineteenth century literature is its historicism. The science of archaeology, for example, arose during the 1740’s with systematic digging at Pompeii and Herculaneum, leading to a revival of visual classicism in architecture, sculpture, and painting. Then the nineteenth century began with French archaeological discoveries in Egypt, including the Rosetta stone. As a result, pyramids recur throughout nineteenth century arts as symbols of death, the sphinx and hieroglyphics appear as mysterious embodiments of knowledge denied to humanity, and Egypt itself becomes the new symbol (replacing Rome) of antiquarian grandeur. Incremental archaeological enthusiasm soon overwhelmed Europe and its more creative minds with statuary from the Parthenon, winged lions from Assyria, relics from Troy, many now-familiar classical masterpieces, and vast new sites, art forms, and religions from the Americas, Asia, and Africa. During the nineteenth century also, the concept of geological time was established, with all its vast duration and wondrous legacy of vanished giants. Thus, the nineteenth century past no longer began with Adam, but instead an immensely complex progression through incalculable time from uncertain beginnings to the illustrious present. No other century in the history of the West experienced such a readjustment of its time sense as did the nineteenth.

Although overwhelmingly Protestant, nineteenth century writers in England and the United States were often attracted to the Catholic Middle Ages. Gothic architecture was popularly revived in Britain, and there was a resurgence of medieval craftsmanship in the Pre-Raphaelite movement of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, which (together with the aesthetic and social criticism of John Ruskin) did much to reduce the ugliness of overindustrialized Victorian minor arts. Poets likewise returned to the Middle Ages for inspiration, though seldom realistically. For Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, James Russell Lowell, Morris, and other writers, medievalism was a utopian alternative to the deficiencies of the present, but one that the cold scrutiny of history could not fully corroborate.

To some extent, the same disparity characterizes the nineteenth century’s image of classical Greece, which overshadowed Rome in cultural prestige and was accepted as a symbol of liberty, whether political, intellectual, or behavioral. For the many Hellenists of the nineteenth century, Greek mythology was a major inspiration. Among the most popular myths was that of Prometheus, which attracted William Blake, Thomas Campbell, Lord Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Bridges, and especially Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom Prometheus was the mythological embodiment of enlightened, technological man. In related contexts, Byron died on behalf of Greek independence, and Keats revered its artistic legacy. Mid-Victorian writers, such as Tennyson, valued Greece primarily for its writers, particularly Homer, while later ones such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy admired the realism of Greek tragedy. Greek lyric poetry found readers throughout the century and influenced A. E. Housman, especially. Combining the lyric and dramatic traditions of classical Greece, Shelley attempted two lyric dramas on Greek subjects, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (pb. 1820) and Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (pb. 1822), which would be imitated later by Arnold (“Empedocles on Etna,” 1852), Algernon Charles Swinburne (Atalanta in Calydon, pb. 1865), and Hardy (The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars, pb. 1903, 1906, 1908, 1910). The pagan, libertarian, and sometimes erotic influence of Greece was taken very seriously.

Nineteenth century writers admired individuality and boldness. They found the heroic age of exploration particularly congenial, as poems about Christopher Columbus (for example) were written by Joel Barlow, Samuel Rogers, William Lisle Bowles, Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Joaquin Miller, and Lowell. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) was based on exploration literature and the voyage of Magellan; Keats mistook Cortez for Balboa; while Bowles and Whitman celebrated Vasco da Gama and the spirit of discovery in general. Other heroes of the century included George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, the duke of Wellington, and Abraham Lincoln. There were also many poems and essays about writers, including Homer, Vergil, Dante, William Shakespeare, Torquato Tasso, John Milton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the British Romantic poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Whitman. Artists of the Italian Renaissance were often extolled for their individuality—the Renaissance as a whole was popular—and various Enlightenment figures (Bacon, Newton, Voltaire, and Rousseau primarily) were either praised or damned, according to the religious preferences of the writer. Surprisingly little was written, however, in praise of religious heroes as such.

Religious doubt

Traditional religion was sorely pressed throughout the nineteenth century (its latter half particularly) to retain credibility in the face of pervasive doubts which arose on all sides—from biblical criticism, undermining the literal word; from Enlightenment objections to religious authority and intolerance; from the diversity of religious observance and the insipidity of orthodox spirituality; and from the currently popular philosophies of materialism and utilitarianism, neither of which found much use for the inanities of a debased theological tradition that, during the eighteenth century, had clearly become part of an oppressive church-and-state establishment. One of the most pervasive features of nineteenth century literature, therefore, is religious doubt, which frequently resolved itself in any of several ways: by regarding history as a manifestation of God, turning from God to humans, abandoning religion in favor of art, or returning to orthodox belief. Though there were also a number of alternative faiths, including spiritualism, the guiding light of the century was science.

British Romanticism

The century began with the English Romantics, who were influential in both England and America. Neoclassical literature, which dominated the first half of the eighteenth century in England, emphasized practical reason, social conformity, emotional restraint, and submission to the authority of classical literary techniques. It was generally allied to political and religious conservatism as well. As life in eighteenth century England was transformed by political, economic, social, and technological innovations, however, the old manner of literary expression seemed increasingly obsolete to younger and more audacious writers who had absorbed the Enlightenment philosophy of humanism and freedom.

Robert Burns

Among the first of these new men in literature was Robert Burns (1759-1796). Though he did not live quite long enough to experience the nineteenth century at first hand, Burns strikingly exemplified a number of its tendencies. Far from apologizing for either his Scottish burr or his rural origins, at a time when both were disparaged in polite society, he appealed to the 1780’s as a supposedly untutored genius, a natural poet whose verses arose not from the inkwell but from theheart. Beneath his colorful regionalism and earthy rural sensuality there remained a stubborn dignity, an antiaristocratic humanity, and a concentration upon his own emotions that favored meditative and lyric poetry. Burns’s carefree morality and religious satire signaled the approaching end of religious orthodoxy in British poetry (it would last longer in the United States) and effectively countered the turgid morbidity into which so many mid-century versifiers had fallen. In his egalitarian social attitudes (“A man’s a man for a’ that”), Burns portended the imminent French Revolution of 1789. His literary influence throughout the next century extended to Scott, Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lowell, Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling, all of whom profited from Burns’s use of dialect in serious literature and from his revolutionary insistence that the right of an individual to worth and dignity is not dependent on the urbanity of his speech.

William Blake

If William Blake (1757-1827), of Burns’s generation, was not so obviously an outsider as the Scottish poet, he soon became one through the seeming incomprehensibility of his highly individualistic poetry and art. A firm supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Blake was also the first important author to sense the underlying dynamism of his times. No other poet, for example, perceived the historical importance of either the Industrial Revolution or the political upheaval in the United States so clearly. Similarly, no other poet has influenced twentieth century theories of literature so much. However, Blake was dismissed as a madman in his own times, and his influence on nineteenth century literature became important only toward the end, with Swinburne, Rossetti, James Thomson, and William Butler Yeats. It is now clear, however, that Blake’s concerns with innovation, energy, myth, lyric, and sexuality were extremely prescient.

William Wordsworth

Though William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was more in accord with late eighteenth century restraint than Blake, he effected the most significant theoretical change ever seen in English literature and did more than any other individual to give nineteenth century literature its distinctive character. With its explicit rejection of neoclassicism and the aristocratic tradition in literature, Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798 (first American edition, 1800), written with Coleridge, is often considered the official beginning of the literary nineteenth century. Its famous preface, added to the English edition of 1800, outlined Wordsworth’s new criteria for literature, to which virtually all the significant poets of his century would subscribe. His influence is evident in Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Hardy, among major British poets, and in Bryant, Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Whittier, among American ones. He was the most written-about poet of the century. Wordsworth also had a significant impact upon non-poets such as John Stuart Mill; even Charles Darwin read him. Nineteenth century literature in all its forms is immensely indebted to Wordsworth’s preoccupations with rural life, childhood, mental and emotional development, language, history, and nature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Although Wordsworth’s collaborator, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), was also an accomplished poet, his substantial influence on later writers (Emerson in particular) came primarily through his prose. As a poet, however, he influenced Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Keats, and Edgar Allan Poe, preceding the latter as a symbolist of sometimes uncanny power. Coleridge was also a foremost theorist and critic of English Romanticism, as well as an effective transmitter of German Romantic thought to both England and America.

Sir Walter Scott

Wordsworth and Coleridge now seem far greater poets, but Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Lord Byron were more immediately popular, not only in Britain and the United States but also throughout Europe. In his narrative poems and many novels (all too hastily written), Scott further popularized regionalism, historicism, and folk traditions. His novels influenced Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, thus virtually beginning nineteenth century literature in America, and created an immense vogue for historical literature of all kinds; his poetic insistence on a nationalistic Scottish muse helped to inspire the Irish harp of Thomas Moore, the Indian one of Bankim Chatterjee, and the “barbaric yawp” of Whitman. Longfellow was also indebted to Scott’s influence for his well-known longer poems on American themes, but went beyond Scott in the amazing cosmopolitanism of his literary sources. In his pseudomedieval manor house at Abbotsford—much copied by his fellow artisans—Scott played the gracious host to innumerable literary visitors, several of them American. Throughout his lifetime, he was the kindest and most accessible major literary figure in Europe. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Britain was preoccupied with its resistance to Napoleon and travel on the Continent was scarcely possible, Scott was also his country’s most popular poet.

Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats

Lord Byron (1788-1824) dominated the Regency, when from 1811 to 1820 England was governed by their heir apparent (later George IV), George III having been declared hopelessly insane. Byron’s contradictory but forceful verses, cynical and witty as they were, appealed to a disillusioned younger generation who had seen its hopes for political reform quashed by the failure of the French Revolution and its taste for heroics eradicated by the unnecessary holocaust of the Napoleonic wars. After 1816, however, as England reverted to peacetime reconstruction, Byron’s immorality and religious heterodoxy became too much. He was forced into exile on the Continent that year, soon to be followed by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), against whom the same charges were leveled, and (primarily for reasons of health) by John Keats (1795-1821), who appeared to some imperceptive critics as nothing more than a sensuously explicit Cockney. These judgments, of course, did not prevail as Byron’s influence extended to John Clare, Tennyson, Arthur Hugh Clough, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Brontë, Poe, Whitman, and Miller; Shelley’s to Arthur Henry Hallam, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Thomson, Hardy, and Yeats; and Keats’s to Tennyson, Thomas Hood, Rossetti, Morris, Emily Dickinson, Lowell, Swinburne, and innumerable minor poets. The Byronic hero also became a familiar type in Victorian fiction, Shelley had a major impact upon freethinkers and labor leaders, and Keats became almost a model for both writers and artists during the latter half of the century. Thus, the major English Romantic poets as a group were highly influential in and beyond literature throughout the nineteenth century.

American Transcendentalists

The Transcendentalist movement in the United States during the 1830’s and 1840’s, centering on Emerson (1803-1882)—who disassociated himself from the term—was an awakening of new literary possibilities comparable to, and in part derived from, the literary revolution initiated by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Whereas British Romanticism was often a rebellion against social oppression within the country itself, however, much of its American equivalent was pitted against the tyranny of British literary predominance and European snobbishness generally. William Ellery Channing concluded in 1830 (“Remarks on National Literature”) that a truly American literature did not yet exist, and there were many subsequent laments regarding the Yankee failure to achieve cultural independence. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” proclaimed Emerson in his famous oration on “The American Scholar” in 1837. Nathaniel Parker Willis, a minor poet from New York, was even more emphatic two years later. “In literature,” he claimed,

we are no longer a nation. The triumph of Atlantic steam navigation has driven the smaller drop into the larger, and London has become the center. Farewell nationality! The English language now marks the limits of a new literary empire, and America is a suburb.

Like many desperate pronouncements, this one soon proved wrong, but it was by no means clear in 1839 that those then living would witness the remarkable effulgence of American letters that was to come.

The significant American poets whose emergence showed Willis to be a false prophet included Emerson, Thoreau, Jones Very, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell. Emerson himself was a major influence on contemporary and later American poets, including Thoreau, Very, Whitman, and Dickinson. His essays influenced such remarkable British thinkers as Thomas Carlyle, Arnold, Clough, John Sterling, James Anthony Froude, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. Poe, eventually a force in France, was significant in England only for Swinburne, Rossetti, and Thomson. Whitman appealed to a number of late Victorians, influencing Tennyson (in “Vastness”), Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, Lionel Johnson, Edward Dowden, and even Robert Louis Stevenson. Those who appreciated his accomplishments were generally also fond of Blake and Shelley. Longfellow became the most popular poet in the English-speaking world around the mid-century, so beloved in Britain and elsewhere that hundreds of his editions appeared, including one of The Song of Hiawatha (1855) illustrated by Frederick Remington. Although Longfellow has come to be considered only a genial minor figure in world literature, he alone among American poets was accorded by his British admirers a memorial in the Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. As for the others, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell had only moderate international appeal, while Thoreau, Very, Dickinson, and Herman Melville were virtually unknown. Even so, it could no longer be said that literary influences between England and America ran only in one direction.

From certain Germanic sources, often transmitted through the philosophical prose of Coleridge and Carlyle, Emerson and his associates derived a fundamental conviction that all material facts are emblematic of spiritual truths, which led them to believe that religious revelation was continuous. This openness to factual and spiritual enlightenment prompted American writers to read widely, often in untraditional sources. Thus, classical works of Asian religion, the Bhagavadgītā (c. 200 b.c.e.-200 c.e.; The Bhagavad Gita, 1785) and others, were of interest. The Orientalism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, more serious and better informed than that to be found in the work of earlier English poets such as Moore (Lalla Rookh, 1817), helped them to accept the benevolent impermanence of nature.

Because of their belief in progressive revelation, American Transcendentalists were also more able than their British literary counterparts to accept the current findings of natural science—astronomy, geology, and biology—by which many nineteenth century writers were influenced. Though these three sciences were together discrediting the Creation narrative in Genesis (a task virtually completed by 1840), and suggesting the relative insignificance of humans in a mechanistic world of vast time and space, the American Transcendentalists remained almost sanguine in denying the unique status of any one religious tradition, for they regarded the world of nature (whose cruelty they overlooked) as God’s most reliable revelation of himself and as a corrective to the mythological understanding of all earlier peoples.

Attitudes toward nature

Attitudes toward nature remained benign in America well after they had become suspect in Britain, where a skeptical tradition among the unorthodox had been articulated by Shelley and soon reasserted itself through Tennyson (1809-1892), who was the official and most influential poet of Victorian England. However, just after Emerson had published his idealistic, Wordsworthian essay Nature (1836), he and Tennyson both read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833), which emphasized the immensity of geological time and raised fundamental questions about the history of life. The book exhilarated Emerson, who regarded it as a demonstration of the pervasiveness of natural law, and hence of morality. Tennyson, however, had still not reconciled himself to the premature death of his friend Hallam at the age of twenty-two and was led by Lyell into agonizing despair over a seemingly amoral world in which whole species perished routinely.

Tennyson’s doubts were eventually assuaged by his reading of Goethe, his friendship with Carlyle, and a conviction (reinforced by several naturalists) that life’s record in the rocks was purposeful and upward. However, his literary resolution of the dilemma in In Memoriam (1850), the greatest long poem of its time, only temporarily delayed the specter of amoral, indifferent nature that would come to haunt the remaining half of the nineteenth century. In the United States, on the contrary, the prevailing attitude toward nature long remained that of Thoreau’s Walden (1854) or even became symbolic of national greatness, as western exploration revealed mountains, rivers, and other scenic wonders unequaled in England; surely they were emblematic of the country and its future. The future that most concerned Americans at mid-century belonged to this life rather than the next, for their nation had been imperiled by issues of slavery and states’ rights, despite the glitter of California gold.

Victorian reforms and doubts

In general, the first third of the literary nineteenth century in England was preoccupied with political questions, as public concern responded in turn to the French Revolution and its failure; to the subsequent rise, threats, and necessary defeat of Napoleon; to the internal dislocations of the Regency; to the complicated international situation after Waterloo; and especially to needed reforms at home—for inequities between social classes were rife, and England seemed to be on the brink of insurrection. After 1832, however, when the first Reform Bill (enfranchising the middle class) was enacted, it became clear that social betterment would be achieved through legislation and education rather than revolution. Poets such as Ebenezer Elliott, Hood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and (in America) Lydia Huntley Sigourney joined Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and other writers of prose in depicting the hard lot of the underprivileged, particularly children and the working poor. Black slavery was no longer at issue in Britain because the slave trade had been abolished in 1807 and slavery itself (common only in the West Indies) in 1832. It would last until 1865 in America. There was also feminist agitation, but this was a social revolution for which the Victorian world was not yet prepared; Victoria herself (crowned in 1837) opposed it.

Even so, a remarkable transformation took place within mid-century England as enlightened advocates uncovered inequities old and new. Among the revolutionary bills passed by reforming parliaments were the Factory Act of 1833, regulating child labor; the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, regulating workhouses; the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, unifying town governments; an act of 1842 prohibiting the employment of women and children in mines; another in 1843 prohibiting imprisonment for debt; the first public health act in 1848; another factory act, shortening hours and days, in 1850; a second major political reform in 1868; and, finally, the great public schools act of 1870. If there were fewer reforming acts in less-developed America, it was in part because fewer were needed. Whatever the indigenous shortcomings of British industrialism, its problems were taken seriously by both workingmen and writers. One of the few European states to avoid armed revolution during the nineteenth century, Britain was perhaps the most socially advanced nation in the world, as well as the most industrialized, for humanitarianism and progress had become its prevailing creeds.

This humanitarianism increasingly superseded orthodox religion, which had begun to experience severe problems of credibility. The Oxford movement toward a more historical Christianity, less dependent on the precise text of the Bible, had begun under John Keble in 1833, but this promising doctrinal initiative on the part of the Anglican Church (official in England) lost effectiveness when John Henry Newman, its most persuasive advocate, announced his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845. The high road to orthodoxy having proved disastrous, Anglican theology was afterward dominated by the Broad Church movement (to which the poets Coleridge and Clough were important), which scarcely emphasized doctrinal conformity at all. Except for Newman, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, few English poets after 1850 were orthodoxly religious.

Tennyson’s In Memoriam managed a dubious immortality for the young skeptic that it commemorated, but other poets of the time were less sure, as Clough and Arnold remained agnostics at best. In Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850), Robert Browning rejected both doctrinal and evangelical Christianity in favor of a theistic religion of love, and Arnold implied much the same in “Dover Beach” (1851). While meeting the equivalent American spiritual crisis with more gusto, Whitman observed in Leaves of Grass (1855) that “Creeds and schools” were “in abeyance.” His own faith derived from all religions and did not include curiosity about God. In a poem of 1871 addressed to Whitman, however, Swinburne admitted that “God is buried and dead to us.” Among American poets, Melville and Dickinson became religious seekers; Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow, among others, remained relatively confident of supernatural goodness throughout the 1850’s and 1860’s, but their optimism (shared by Tennyson and Browning to some extent) seemed increasingly tenuous to younger readers.

One by one, traditional verities disappeared from English and American literature, and more rapidly in Britain. God was doubtful, nature cruel, history vindictive, love impossible, and humans animalistic and corrupt. The poet who articulated the new disillusionment most forcefully, Arnold (1822-1888), saw himself as an isolated wanderer through a post-Christian, postrationalistic wilderness of historical and personal estrangement. Like Shelley’s poet in Alastor (1816), Arnold sought for love and could not find it; of all men he wrote, “Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.” Several later Victorian poets, including Robert Browning (Men and Women, 1855), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Meredith, and Coventry Patmore, wrote extensively of their relationships with women, and of the failure of love; others turned from normal eroticism altogether. Compare these works with other long poems of the times which concentrate on women, including Tennyson, The Princess (1847), and “Guinevere,” taken from Idylls of the King (1859-1885); Clough, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856); Longfellow, The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858); and Morris, The Defence of Guenevere (1858).

Influence of natural selection

As for nature, history, and humanity, all three had become suspect by mid-century and all three coalesced in the theory of natural selection publicized by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), which transformed nineteenth century skepticism into disillusioned pessimism and savage exploitation. Darwin’s work inspired a major literary movement called naturalism and certainly ennobled the tragic sense of such powerful, effective poets as Hardy (1840-1928) and Stephen Crane (1871-1900). In both England and America, Darwin’s harsh view of nature was coupled with the reality of war (India, 1857; Charleston, 1861; Havana, 1898). Perhaps even more disillusioning, however, was the incremental recognition in both countries that the optimism of previous decades regarding human nature was implausible. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century authors repeatedly proclaimed, though usually in prose, that human beings are defiled on the surface and ugly to the core. Though the century could bear its religious losses with stoic fortitude, it could not maintain an essentially optimistic outlook against the pervasive antihumanism of its final years.

Allied with art

Throughout the nineteenth century, literature had been closely allied with art. Much of its descriptive poetry, for example, was based on painted forebears or similar contemporary work; thus, Wordsworth is often compared with John Constable, Shelley with J. M. W. Turner, Coleridge with German Romantic art, Byron with Eugène Delacroix, and Browning with the Impressionists. Several important writers, including Blake, Ruskin, Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were authentic artists in their own right; others combined their verbal work with others’ art to collaborate on illustrated editions. That poets were makers of pictures, as the Roman poet Horace had declared, was assumed throughout the century. They became interpreters of pictures also, as can be seen in Bowles, Wordsworth, and especially Browning. For many later nineteenth century poets, however, the writer was no longer a prophet but a critic, concerned less with cosmic purpose than with humanity’s revelation of itself through art.

Transition to a minor art

It is symptomatic of the times that poetry became more personal, less prestigious, and even private (Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins) as public utterances turned instead to evaluation of the literary past. Thus, Arnold virtually abandoned poetry for criticism of various kinds, while Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lowell, Swinburne, and William Watson all reveal critical aspirations overtopping creative ones. Major anthologies of the time, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Francis Palgrave, show that poetry appealed to the later nineteenth century more as conventional verbal prettiness than as original thought; a great deal of it was essentially decoration. Fanciful, but not imaginative (in the searching, Romantic sense), late Victorian poetry soon became, with only a few exceptions, a minor art, as statements of intellectual importance tended increasingly to be made in prose.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his circle, which fostered both poetry and art, was a major attempt to defend creative imagination against the economic, social, and intellectual forces that were depressing it, which is to say, against the impersonality of manufacture, the bad taste of the rising middle class, and the unidimensional reality of empirical science. William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was, with his brother, largely responsible for bringing Whitman, Miller, and Edward FitzGerald’s the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) to critical attention, while reviving interest in the work of Blake and Shelley. Only a small coterie in London, however, fully appreciated how desperate the artistic situation had become. From them emerged Yeats (1865-1939), an Irish cultural nationalist influenced by Moore and Scott, who based his major poems (mostly twentieth century) on the bold visions of Blake and Shelley, while rejecting Tennysonian doubt and the depressing outlook of scientific materialism. Tennyson, Robert Browning, Whitman, Arnold, Hardy, and Yeats have come to be regarded as the most significant British poets of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and all have had their impact on subsequent writers.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Isobel, Cath Sharrock, and Joseph Brigtow, eds. Nineteenth Century Women Poets: An Anthology. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Presents the work of more than one hundred women writers and achieves range and depth by reprinting poems by working-class, colonial, and political poets, in addition to very substantial selections from the work of major figures.

Axelrod, Steven Gould, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano, eds. Traditions and Revolutions, Beginnings to 1990. Vol. 1 in The New Anthology of American Poetry. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. The first volume of an ambitious three-volume work in progress. Part 2 of this book covers the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the Civil War; part 3, from the Civil War to 1900.

Beach, Christopher. Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Demonstrates how Walt Whitman differentiated his work from previous literary models, while he sought to portray daily life and the concerns of the common people in an idiomatic, rather than a high-minded literary manner.

Blyth, Caroline, ed. Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late-Victorian Poetry, 1872-1900. London: Anthem Press, 2009. Expands the traditional definition of decadence so as to apply it to writers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Hardy, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelites and to many lesser-known poets. Fifty women writers are included in this extensive collection. Critical commentaries put the works into a historical context, and chronologies list developments in prose and in the visual arts.

Chapman, Alison, ed. Victorian Women Poets. Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2003. A collection of essays commissioned by the English Association. Many suggest new interpretations of the canonical poets, while others focus on recently discovered writers. Recurring themes in the essays include poetics, politics, publishing, the expansion of the British Empire, and the passion for social justice.

Gray, F. Elizabeth. Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2009. Investigates how Victorian women used Christian texts in their poetry, reinterpreting passages to support their own experiences and to challenge gender repression. An illuminating study.

Gray, Janet, ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Includes sixty-eight American women writers and their works, which appeared in print in the context of social purposes—the abolitionist movement, the temperance movement, the Hawaiian nationalist movement, the Sunday School movement, the Zionist movement, and the woman suffrage movement.

Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Explores the relationship between the visual and the verbal achievements of the two poet-artists and explains how their example influenced later poets and poetics. Plates and illustrations. Bibliography and index.

Jackson-Houlston, C. M. Ballads, Songs, and Snatches: The Appropriation of Folk Song and Popular Culture in British Nineteenth Century Realist Prose. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. Focuses on nineteenth century British literary allusions to folk songs and popular culture. Examines the work and attitudes of authors of the period who attempted to mediate the culture of the working classes for the enjoyment of middle-class audiences.

Lambdin, Laura Cooner, and Robert T. Lambdin. Camelot in the Nineteenth Century: Arthurian Characters in the Poems of Tennyson, Arnold, Morris, and Swinburne. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Examines how four poets used figures, events, and ideas from the Arthurian legends in their work and for their own ends. The authors conclude that the poets sought not to reflect historical reality but to produce religious, aesthetic, and political systems of representation.

O’Gorman, Francis, ed. Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Illustrated. Includes all the major poets and some lesser-known writers. All the poetic genres of the Victorian era are represented. Biographical headnotes for each poet, and every poem is prefaced by a useful introduction and is fully annotated. Chronology.

Olson, Steven. The Prairie in Nineteenth Century American Poetry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Examines the poetry of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Explores the idea of the prairie as the principal metaphor for embodying the issues present in the political, social, and cultural life of nineteenth century America.

O’Neill, Michael, and Charles Mahoney, eds. Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Illustrated. Contains selected works of ten Romantic poets and a variety of poetic forms. Excellent introduction, chronology, headnotes, and annotations.

Storey, Mark. The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Examines the relationship between the various Romantic manifestos and the major poetry of the time, finding that despite the apparent confidence of many writers, there was an underlying unease about the validity of poetry.

Wagner, Jennifer Ann. A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth Century English Sonnet. Madison, Wis.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Argues that the history of the sonnet in the nineteenth century is more than a decorative strand in its literary fabric. This book is mainly about William Wordsworth, who discovers, through Milton, that at the heart of the sonnet’s power as a form is the trope of synecdoche, which he connects up with the very moment and act of representation—thereby “inventing” the visionary Romantic sonnet.