English Verse 1830 - 1890

Bernard Richards, Alastair Fowler, Brian Richards

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317872986
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria

This popular anthology provides a collection of the most significant Victoran verse xxx; including some minor figures notably John Clare, Emily Bronte and James Thomson. Fully annotated, this collection contains introductions to individual poets, headnotes to the poems and full and informative footnotes. It represents Victorian poetic taste at its best and is the ideal companion for everyone interested in poetry of the period.

Alfred Tennyson

Life and Writings Alfred Tennyson was born in the small and remote village of Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds on 6 Aug. 1809. His early environment was bleak and lonely, with the rarely calm North Sea only seven miles away. T.'s mother Elizabeth was a gentle and pious lady, who had twelve children in all; his father George, the rector of the parish, was a cultivated man, with a large library, but his proneness to manic-depressive states and to alcoholism cast a gloomy shadow over the family. T.'s grandfather, the owner of Bayons Manor near Tealby, disinherited his father (the eldest son) in favour of the second son Charles, who subsequently became a staunch establishment man, took the name d'Eyncourt, and rebuilt Bayons in the latest neogothic style. T.'s side of the family became the poor relations. But time has its revenges: Bayons is now a ruin and T.'s work lives on.

The society in which the child moved was the immediate family; he was especially close to his elder brother Charles. There were four unsatisfactory years at Louth Grammar School; but most of the tuition took place at home. T. was a precocious child who covered 'two sides of a slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers' when he was about eight. At twelve he wrote an epic, in the style of Scott, of 6,000 lines, and at fourteen a blank verse drama The Devil and the Lady (first published in 1930), followed a year or two later by The Coach of Death. In April 1827 Charles and Alfred published Poems by Two Brothers (though there were also contributions from Frederick (b. 1807)). T.'s upbringing and literary taste were characterized by a great breadth of culture: the classics, Augustan and Romantic English literature, and a good deal of miscellaneous, cultivated learning; but the local vigour of the ordinary Lincolnshire people also left its mark, as one sees in the lively poems below: Nos. 54 and 55.

In February 1828 Charles and Alfred matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Like Wordsworth before him, he was far from happy with the university, and wrote to an aunt: 'The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting, so much matter of fact'. Nevertheless, he owed much to Cambridge, where he met Arthur Hallam and became a member of 'the Apostles', a group of advanced thinkers concerned with philosophical idealism, social reform, science and the arts, which had begun as a debating club in St John's, but assumed a place of importance in 1824 when John Sterling and F. D. Maurice became its guiding lights. When T. and Arthur Hallam joined the circle in January 1830 it helped them to focus their ideas. The friendship with Hallam was of central importance. He was the son of the distinguished historian Henry Hallam (1777-1859). At Eton he had been a close friend of Gladstone, and he came up to Trinity in June 1828 as the most promising youth of his generation although there was disagreement as to how the promise was to be realized, especially since his Remains of 1834 ran to only 363 pages.

In 1831 T. left Cambridge without a degree. His only University honour was to win the Chancellor's Gold Medal with the poem Timbuctoo (1829). He was well on the way to being known as a poet after Poems, Chiefly Lyrical of 1830. Like poets of a much later time, he also had an experience of Spanish politics, going with Hallam to the Pyrenees to bring military instructions to northern insurrectionaries.

In 1831 T.'s father died. In 1832 he published another volume of poems reviewed very harshly by J. W. Croker in the Quarterly. In 1833, Hallam became engaged to T.'s sister Emily (b. 1811), but by the end of September he was dead, struck down by a haemorrhage in Vienna. For the immediate impact of this on T. see headnote to No. 49. Over the next seventeen years he worked away at the poetic dramatization of his grief that became In Memoriam. In 1834 he fell in love with Rosa Baring, of the prosperous banking family, but became disillusioned with her in a year or so. His brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood in 1836. T.'s love for her sister Emily began at about this time. The courtship was almost as protracted as the writing of In Memoriam, since both the marriage and the publication of the poem took place in 1850. Meanwhile, throughout the 1830s, he was working away in silence (the period is known as 'the ten years' silence'), losing his fortune in a speculative investment in 1840-3, republishing his 1830 and 1832 poems (heavily revised), and publishing new poems in 1842. In 1847 The Princess made an interesting contribution to the women's rights debate.

I. was not, in the 1830s and 40s, a misanthropic, mystical recluse: he was developing friendships with Monckton Milnes, Edward Fitzgerald and Carlyle. The latter thought of him 'carrying a bit of Chaos about him ... which he is manufacturing into Cosmos'.

The year 1850 was T.'s annus mirabilis: he married, published In Memoriam (anonymously, but it was widely known who had written it) and succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate. In 1853 the family moved to Farringdon on the Isle of Wight, where he was virtually an institution for twenty years, visited by pilgrims of varying complexions, from Prince Albert to Swinburne, Jowett, Lewis Carroll, the Longfellows, Garibaldi, The Queen of the Sandwich Islands, and Clough's old tutor W. G. Ward. The Charge of the Light Brigade gave T. a currency far beyond the usual poetic circles. Maud (1855) is perhaps his last unquestionably great work, yet there were almost forty years of prolific poetic activity before him. T. and Browning were often held up as antipodal: they met rarely, and T. did not like or read Browning's work - though there was a memorable evening in 1855 when T. read Maud, and Browning read parts of Men and Women and D. G. Rossetti sketched T. T. and Browning, for different reasons, were both highly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites who contributed thirty of the fifty-four illustrations to the famous Moxon edition of T.'s poems (1857).

In 1859 the Idylls of the King began to be published (Enid, Vivien, Elaine and Guinevere); by 1872 they were virtually complete. In 1862, his first audience with Queen Victoria placed the seal on his respectability and centrality in English cultural life. Fame brought drawbacks: when privacy became almost impossible on the tourist-haunted Isle of Wight, he fled (1868) to Aldworth, near Haslemere in Surrey.

An interesting late development was his venture into play-writing, with Queen Ma...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note by the General Editor
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chronological table
• Introduction
• John Clare (1793‒1864)
• William Barnes (1801‒1886)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806‒1861)
• Alfred Tennyson (1809‒1892)
• Edward FitzGerald (1809‒1883)
• Robert Browning (1812-1889)
• Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
• Arthur Hush Clough (1819‒1861)
• Matthew Arnold (1822‒1888)
• Coventry Patmore (1823‒1895)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1823‒1882)
• George Meredith (1828-1909)
• William Morris (1834‒1896)
• James Thomson (B.V.) (1834‒1882)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 1909)
• Thomas Hardy (1840‒1928)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844‒1889)
• Francis Thompson (1859‒1907)
• Index of Titles and First Lines