The Pertinacious Victorian Poets

Abstract

The English literature of the Victorian period seems to be emerging at last from the cloud of contempt that has overshadowed it for the past generation. All types of literature endured their share of that disdain, but upon poetry it was heaped without mitigation. Although the writers of expository prose were stigmatized for inconsistency of thinking, for hypocritical morality, for ornate rhetoric, it had to be admitted that they struggled obstinately with many basic problems of the modern world and that their opinions largely determined our contemporary standards and even our political experiments. The novelists were accused of sentimentality, melodrama, prudishness, didacticism, and external characterization; but there was no denying the fact that somehow they had created a multitude of human beings who insisted on inhabiting the reader's memory like living acquaintances, in spite of their reprehensible lack of all Freudian symptoms. The poets, however, incurred the full brunt of all the same indictments, without the qualifying allowances that partially sheltered their prose brethren.