Victorians to Modern

Just a few brief statements regarding the Victorians/Early Moderns--as we've been exploring, with passing generations the poetic climate changes, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes on a smaller scale. At times the change is a continuation of past philosophies and techniques, while at other times we a see a sort of erasure--a turning away from precursors. These zigs and zags happen not only as reactions to precursor-poets/poetry, but also as a result of outside cultural/historical influences.

For the Victorian Era (commonly marked out by Queen Victoria's rule of England from 1837-1901), we see a literature that is at least partly affected by changes in technology, which affected Industry (this is after all the height of the Industrial Revolution in Britain); changes also in the sciences, notably the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, which had an effect, among other things on the way people began to view organized religion. Not to say that this applies to all poets, but you can see the questioning of faith in the poems by Hopkins (a Jesuit Minister) and Thomas Hardy (see "Hap" among other poems). The poems of E. A. Robinson also seem to deal with an increasingly urban and industrial England, and the down-trodden characters associated with it.

These are just a few examples-- of course others exist in the poems by Hardy, Yeats and others that deal with War (WW I was obviously a major cultural/historical event that happened at the end of the Victorian era and helped usher in the Modernism (which we will visit in the coming weeks)). As it stands, one contrast to take is the contrast between the lush landscapes of the Romantics and the ones detailed by the poets we read for this week.