Elizabeth Barret

VICTORIAN ROMANTIC POETRY

Although Victorian verse is broadly post-Romantic, giving new inflections to the personal, subjective, emotional and idealistic impulses of the Romantics, it is more various than this suggests. Expressive and plangent, it is also descriptive, of nature and of domestic and urban life. Often it half-dramatizes figures from history, legend and literature. Browning,Clough and Hopkins suggest an idiosyncrasy of subject, language and metre equally pronounced in less serious and less major poets.

JOHN CLARE (1793–1864) was an English poet, the son of a farm laborer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he isoften now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets.

Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury. Drury sent Clare's poetry to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who hadpublished the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published.

In his time, Clare was commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Since his formal education was brief, Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardised English grammarand orthography in his poetry and prose. Many of his poems would come to incorporate terms used locally in his Northamptonshire dialect, such as 'pooty' (snail), 'lady-cow' (ladybird), 'crizzle' (to crisp) and 'throstle' (song thrush).

In his early life he struggled to find a place for his poetry in the changing literary fashions of the day. He also felt that he did not belong with otherpeasants. Clare once wrote:
"I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that tono purpose."

It is common to see an absence of punctuation in many of Clare's original writings, although many publishers felt the need to remedy this practice in the majority of his work. Clare argued with his editors about how it should be presented to the public.

ALFRED TENNYSON (1809–1892) was poet of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and remains one of the mostpopular poets in the English language. Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "In the Valley of Cauteretz", "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poetand fellow student at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson's sister, but died before they could marry.

A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplaces of the English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw", " “Than never to have loved at all”, "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Becausemy heart is pure", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

In 1829 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuctoo". Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honour for a young man of twenty to win the...