By Nathan Garrett
In all things, there is nothing quite like inspiration. It drives feelings. It drives creativity. It drives the yearning for discovery. In the Romantic imagination, it was inspiration that led poets toward what William Wordsworth called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” In Romanticism, such emphasis was placed on inspiration—inspiration that produced “an outpouring of feeling and emotional intensity” (Sayre 884). This was the Romantic imagination, manifesting itself in literature insistently and unapologetically. This tendency toward powerful and vivid expression that would later be seen in Victorian poetry was harnessed to the ambition of Romantic poetry.
The Victorian period was an important era in the history of poetry, “providing the link between the Romantic Movement and the Modernist Movement of the 20th Century” (Poet Seers). There was an enthusiasm in Romanticism for life, for all things, that was insubordination against the Enlightenment that preceded it. The visible world, all things natural, informed the poet’s views of himself. “In nature the Romantics discovered not just the wellspring of their own creativity, but the very presence of God, the manifestation of the divine on the earth” (Sayre 885). And where there are representations of nature in Victorian poetry, God, as the driving force in and of all things, pervades poetic description—not in full faith, and in most cases (as with Tennyson) more in doubt than faith. But a light gets in—even if not a complete illumination. T.S. Eliot comments on the way faith permeates Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s work, “In Memoriam can, I think, justly be called a religious poem, but for another reason than that which made it seem religious to its contemporaries. It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience” (Eliot 177). Romantic tendencies inform Victorian poetry which is characterized by an overflow of spontaneous feeling, modes of spiritual expression, and an intense emphasis on the human imagination.
In strong feeling induced by the promise of political change in the Romantic era, William Wordsworth had produced a poem related to the French Revolution in his Prelude:
Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! (Wordsworth)
Likewise, when Alfred, Lord Tennyson read the report in The Times of the Light Brigade’s catastrophic charge in the Battle of Balaklava under confused orders from the British Army, he was compelled by an intensity of feeling to pen a response. “The poem is the creature of its insistent rhythm, which captures the headlong plunge of the cavalry with great brilliance” (Seamus). This response appeared in The Examiner on December 9th, 1854. The poem was entitled, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made,
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred. (Tennyson)
While Victorian poetry gives the impression of being more religious than Romantic poetry, it often seems steeped in doubt. Yet still, as with Robert Browning, Victorian poetry uses nature as a way to explore deep passion and spirituality. It creates a sense of God in this way:
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard.
the passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by. (Browning 195)
Tennyson, however, remains fixed on the losses of man. The poet hopes for a God in the afterlife, but not as a means of comforting the heart. It seems more or less the next probable thing, ironically enough. “He was desperately anxious to hold the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe: he was capable of illumination which he was incapable of understanding” (Eliot 176). Tennyson’s faith in love relies more on what has been than what still can be. He lingers in past love affairs, and does not place much value on the prospect of being reunited with the one his soul longs for. “His feelings were more honest than his mind” (Eliot 177). American literary critic Harold Bloom calls Tennyson “the most accomplished artist of all English poets since Milton and Pope.” Bloom, too, hints at the fact that Tennyson was not all-in in matters of faith and religion. “If Tennyson is something of a split poetic personality, this does not make his work less powerful, nor does it affect his poetry where it is strongest in style, by which more than diction and metric is meant” (Bloom 593).
The Victorians lavished the era with poetry that truly does shine. It is a poetry wrought out of burgeoning expressions of love. This is not the love merely of what is visible, but also includes the unseen. Or, what can no longer be seen. Victorian passion cycles through loss, confusion, and love…again. The Romantic age taught the Victorians how to feel. It essentially provided them with the consent to do so. “For Romantics, the mind was a feeling thing … Feelings, they believed, led to truth, and most of the major writers and artists of the early nineteenth century used their emotions as a primary way of expressing their imagination and creativity” (Sayre 884). Tennyson allows himself to express deep sadness without fear that his words will be seen merely as melancholic in In Memoriam. The poem remains a most reverential and deep acknowledgment not only of the nature of things, but the things that nature helps give meaning:
If all was good and fair we met,
this earth had been the Paradise
It never look’d to human eyes
Since our first Sun arose and set. (Tennyson 18)
Perhaps it “is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” as Tennyson so famously penned. It is surely deep feeling and deep passion (birthed and nurtured by the Romantics) that gave the Victorian poets both maturity and poetic idealism. We see this in the poetry of Robert Browning, who endeavored so mightily to extend his imaginative and creative genius (though he chose a different route than Tennyson). Consider his “Rabbi Ben Ezra:”
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid!” (Browning 197)
Ultimately, Romantic tendencies inform Victorian poetry which is characterized by an overflow of spontaneous feeling, modes of spiritual expression, and an intense emphasis on the human imagination.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print.
Browning, Robert. Selected Poems. New York: Gramercy, 1994. Print.
KulturFilms. The Victorian Poets. YouTube. 2009. 30 April 2016. Web.
Perry, Seamus. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: Making Poetry from War.” Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians. British Library. 30 April 2016. Web.
Poetry Foundation. ” Poet Seers.” Victorian Poets. 30 April 2016. Web.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam: An Authoritative Text. New York: Norton, 1973. Print.
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Poetry Foundation. 30 April 2016. Web.
Wordsworth, William. Complete Poetical Works. 1888. 30 April 2016. Web.
Image: Tennyson as a Young Man by Samuel Laurence via the Virtual Victorian
Whoa!! Good read.