Name : Divya D. Vaghela
Sem :02
Roll no :07
Batch :2018-20
Email ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :06
Subject : The Victorian Literature
Topic : Robert Browning ; The study of a poet.
Words : 2280
Submitted to : MKBU Department of English
Introduction :
The Victorian Age :
# The period of 1820 to 1900 known as the age of ‘victoria’. During this period Queen Victoria developed the much literary forms. So, this age in English literature known as the ‘Victorian Age’. During that period many great writers gave their best contribution to English age as a gift. , Browning, Dickens, Thackray, Meredith, Carlyle, Macaulay and Ruskin there are some great stars of the age. Tennyson the prominent poet of the age. So, now let’s we discussing about Tennyson in detailed. Lord Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809.The son of a clergyman he was born at his father’s living at Somersby in Lincolnshire. After some schooling at Louth, This was not agreeable to him. He was taken education from the Cambridge. University, at the university he was a wholly conventional person.
# We can also say about this period that The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until her death in 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined culture, great advancements in technology, and national self-confidence for Britain. During the Victorian age, Britain was the world's most powerful nation. By the end of Victoria's reign, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. it was also a time of misery, squalor, and urban ugliness And we are going to discuss about two major poet who create a kind of influence in this era.
# While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign: his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864–5. William Thackeray's (1811–1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's (1819–80) Middlemarch (1872), while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose first novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared in 1872 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895.
~ Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most famous poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898, as well as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) is also considered an important literary figure of the period, especially his poems and critical writings. Early poetry of W. B. Yeats was also published in Victoria's reign. With regard to the theatre it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, from the 1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) The Importance of Being Earnest.
The influence of Victorian Age :
Writers from the United States and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada were influenced by the literature of Britain and are often classed as a part of Victorian literature, although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices.[8] Victorian writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda, and New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning. From the sphere of literature of the United States during this time are some of the country's greats including: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
The problem with the classification of "Victorian literature" is the great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.
In the year 1837, Queen Victoria ascended the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and succeeded William the IV. She served for a period of 64 years, till her death in 1901 and it is one of the longest reigns in the history of England. The period was marked by many important social and historical changes that altered the nation in many ways. The population nearly doubled, the British Empire expanded exponentially and technological and industrial progress helped Britain become the most powerful country in the world.
Chief Characteristics of Victorian Period :
While the country saw economic progress, poverty and exploitation were also equally a part of it. The gap between the rich and the poor increased significantly and the drive for material and commercial success was seen to propagate a kind of a moral decay in the society itself. The changing landscape of the country was another concern. While the earlier phase of Romanticism saw a celebration of the country side and the rich landscape of the flora and fauna, the Victorian era saw a changing of the landscape to one of burgeoning industries and factories. While the poor were exploited for their labor, the period witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie or the middle class due to increasing trade between Britain and its colonies and the Reform Bill of 1832 strengthen their hold. There was also a shift from the Romantic ideals of the previous age towards a more realistic acceptance and depiction of society.
One of the most important factors that defined the age was its stress on morality. Strict societal codes were enforced and certain activities were openly looked down upon. These codes were even harsher for women. A feminine code of conduct was levied on them which described every aspect of their being from the proper apparels to how to converse, everything had rules. The role of women was mostly that of being angels of the house and restricted to domestic confines. Professionally very few options were available to them as a woman could either become a governess or a teacher in rich households. Hence they were financially dependent on their husbands and fathers and it led to a commercialization of the institution of marriage.
Literary Trends of the Victorian novel :
• Lose plots (fielding's tradition of writing novel)
• A mixture of strength and weakness
• Entertainment value
• Panoramic value
• Immense variety
• Imaginative rendering of reality
• Humour
• Characterization
• Lack of high artistic standard
Robert Browning :
Robert Browning (1812 –1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Browning was famous for his dramatic monologues and commentary on social institutions. He was married to Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He truly observer of Renaissance period and he admire for it. The Renaissance saw a major shift in theories of art. As “Fra Lippo Lippi” discusses, a new realism, based on observation and detail, was coming to be valued, while traditional, more abstract and more didactic forms of art were losing favor. This shifting in priorities is analogous to the shifting views on art and morality in Browning’s time. The Renaissance, like the Victorian era, was also a time of increasing secularism and concentration of wealth and power. All of these aspects make the Renaissance and the Victorian era rather similar. By talking about the Renaissance, Browning can make his cultural criticism somewhat less biting
I also want to say that Browning aspires to redefine the aesthetic, the rough language of his poems often matches the personalities of his speakers “My Last Duchess,” for example, and uses rhymed couplets. The disjunction between form and content or form and language suggests some of the conflict being described in the poems, whether the conflict is between two moral contentions or is a conflict between aesthetics and ethics as systems. Browning’s rough meters and unpoetic language test a new range for the aesthetic.
How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy !
In this new song of David, from Browning's Saul, we have a suggestion of the astonishing vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning, the one poet of the age who, after thirty years of continuous work, was finally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom future ages may judge to be a greater poet, - perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature since Shakespeare .
The chief difficulty in reading Browning's is the obscurity of his style, which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule. Their attitude towards the poet's early work may be inferred from Tennyson's humorous criticism of sordello. It may be remembered that the first line of this obscure poem is, " who will may hear sordello's story told " ; and that the last line is, " who would has heard sordello's story told. " Tennyson remarked that he understood, and that they were evidently both lies. If we attempt to explain this obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly critics, we find that it has many sources. First, the poet's thought is often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it imperfectly, -
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped.
Second, Browning is led from one thing to another by his own mental associations, and forgets that the Reader's associations may be of an entirely different kind. Third, Browning is careless in his English, and frequently clips his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations. As we do not quite understand his processes of thought, we must stop between the ejaculations to trace out the connections. Fourth, Browning's allusions are often far -fetched, refer -ring to some odd scrap of information which he has picked up in his wide reading, and the ordinary reader finds it difficult to trace and understand them. Finally, Browning wrote too much and revised too little. The time which he should have given to making one thought clear was used in expressing other thoughts that fitted through his head like a flock of swallows. His field was the individual soul, never exactly alike in any two men, and he sought to express the hidden motives and principles which govern individual action. In this field he is like a miner delving underground, sending up masses of mingled earth and ore; and the reader must sift all this material to separate the gold from the dross.
Here, certainly, are sufficient reasons for Browning's obscurity; and we must add the word that the fault seems unpardot, for the simple reason that Browning shows himself capable, at times, of writing directly, melodiously, and with noble simplicity.
He is not, like so many others, an entertaining poet. One cannot read him after dinner, or when settled in a comfortable easy chair. One must sit up, and think, and be alert when he reads Browning. If we accept these conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most stimulating port in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after reading him. And perhaps the best thing we can say of Browning is that his thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well- educated men and women.
His major works :
• Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
Paracelsus
Strafford (play) (1837)
Sordello (1840)
Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles
(play) (1842)
Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
Porphyria's Lover
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
My Last Duchess
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Count Gismond
Johannes Agricola in Meditation
Here I want to put few lines of his work,
“One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho’ right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are buffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
~ Epilogue, Browning
In 1834 he accompanied the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general, on a brief visit to St Petersburg and began Paracelsus, which was published in 1835. Browning's reputation began to make a partial recovery with the publication, 1841–1846, of Bells and Pomegranates, a series of eight pamphlets, originally intended just to include his plays. Fortunately his publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to include some "dramatic lyrics", some of which had already appeared in periodicals.
Conclusion:
In short , I just want to say that Victorian period is also a promoted through the English development and it’s connect their roots with Renaissance time. Tennyson & Browning both are distinguish poet that given their much contribution in literature writing in this era.
Thank you..........
Sem :02
Roll no :07
Batch :2018-20
Email ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :06
Subject : The Victorian Literature
Topic : Robert Browning ; The study of a poet.
Words : 2280
Submitted to : MKBU Department of English
Introduction :
The Victorian Age :
# The period of 1820 to 1900 known as the age of ‘victoria’. During this period Queen Victoria developed the much literary forms. So, this age in English literature known as the ‘Victorian Age’. During that period many great writers gave their best contribution to English age as a gift. , Browning, Dickens, Thackray, Meredith, Carlyle, Macaulay and Ruskin there are some great stars of the age. Tennyson the prominent poet of the age. So, now let’s we discussing about Tennyson in detailed. Lord Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809.The son of a clergyman he was born at his father’s living at Somersby in Lincolnshire. After some schooling at Louth, This was not agreeable to him. He was taken education from the Cambridge. University, at the university he was a wholly conventional person.
# We can also say about this period that The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until her death in 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined culture, great advancements in technology, and national self-confidence for Britain. During the Victorian age, Britain was the world's most powerful nation. By the end of Victoria's reign, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. it was also a time of misery, squalor, and urban ugliness And we are going to discuss about two major poet who create a kind of influence in this era.
# While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign: his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864–5. William Thackeray's (1811–1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's (1819–80) Middlemarch (1872), while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose first novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared in 1872 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895.
~ Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most famous poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898, as well as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) is also considered an important literary figure of the period, especially his poems and critical writings. Early poetry of W. B. Yeats was also published in Victoria's reign. With regard to the theatre it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, from the 1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) The Importance of Being Earnest.
The influence of Victorian Age :
Writers from the United States and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada were influenced by the literature of Britain and are often classed as a part of Victorian literature, although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices.[8] Victorian writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda, and New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning. From the sphere of literature of the United States during this time are some of the country's greats including: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
The problem with the classification of "Victorian literature" is the great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.
In the year 1837, Queen Victoria ascended the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and succeeded William the IV. She served for a period of 64 years, till her death in 1901 and it is one of the longest reigns in the history of England. The period was marked by many important social and historical changes that altered the nation in many ways. The population nearly doubled, the British Empire expanded exponentially and technological and industrial progress helped Britain become the most powerful country in the world.
Chief Characteristics of Victorian Period :
While the country saw economic progress, poverty and exploitation were also equally a part of it. The gap between the rich and the poor increased significantly and the drive for material and commercial success was seen to propagate a kind of a moral decay in the society itself. The changing landscape of the country was another concern. While the earlier phase of Romanticism saw a celebration of the country side and the rich landscape of the flora and fauna, the Victorian era saw a changing of the landscape to one of burgeoning industries and factories. While the poor were exploited for their labor, the period witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie or the middle class due to increasing trade between Britain and its colonies and the Reform Bill of 1832 strengthen their hold. There was also a shift from the Romantic ideals of the previous age towards a more realistic acceptance and depiction of society.
One of the most important factors that defined the age was its stress on morality. Strict societal codes were enforced and certain activities were openly looked down upon. These codes were even harsher for women. A feminine code of conduct was levied on them which described every aspect of their being from the proper apparels to how to converse, everything had rules. The role of women was mostly that of being angels of the house and restricted to domestic confines. Professionally very few options were available to them as a woman could either become a governess or a teacher in rich households. Hence they were financially dependent on their husbands and fathers and it led to a commercialization of the institution of marriage.
Literary Trends of the Victorian novel :
• Lose plots (fielding's tradition of writing novel)
• A mixture of strength and weakness
• Entertainment value
• Panoramic value
• Immense variety
• Imaginative rendering of reality
• Humour
• Characterization
• Lack of high artistic standard
Robert Browning :
Robert Browning (1812 –1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Browning was famous for his dramatic monologues and commentary on social institutions. He was married to Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He truly observer of Renaissance period and he admire for it. The Renaissance saw a major shift in theories of art. As “Fra Lippo Lippi” discusses, a new realism, based on observation and detail, was coming to be valued, while traditional, more abstract and more didactic forms of art were losing favor. This shifting in priorities is analogous to the shifting views on art and morality in Browning’s time. The Renaissance, like the Victorian era, was also a time of increasing secularism and concentration of wealth and power. All of these aspects make the Renaissance and the Victorian era rather similar. By talking about the Renaissance, Browning can make his cultural criticism somewhat less biting
I also want to say that Browning aspires to redefine the aesthetic, the rough language of his poems often matches the personalities of his speakers “My Last Duchess,” for example, and uses rhymed couplets. The disjunction between form and content or form and language suggests some of the conflict being described in the poems, whether the conflict is between two moral contentions or is a conflict between aesthetics and ethics as systems. Browning’s rough meters and unpoetic language test a new range for the aesthetic.
How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy !
In this new song of David, from Browning's Saul, we have a suggestion of the astonishing vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning, the one poet of the age who, after thirty years of continuous work, was finally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom future ages may judge to be a greater poet, - perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature since Shakespeare .
The chief difficulty in reading Browning's is the obscurity of his style, which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule. Their attitude towards the poet's early work may be inferred from Tennyson's humorous criticism of sordello. It may be remembered that the first line of this obscure poem is, " who will may hear sordello's story told " ; and that the last line is, " who would has heard sordello's story told. " Tennyson remarked that he understood, and that they were evidently both lies. If we attempt to explain this obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly critics, we find that it has many sources. First, the poet's thought is often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it imperfectly, -
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped.
Second, Browning is led from one thing to another by his own mental associations, and forgets that the Reader's associations may be of an entirely different kind. Third, Browning is careless in his English, and frequently clips his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations. As we do not quite understand his processes of thought, we must stop between the ejaculations to trace out the connections. Fourth, Browning's allusions are often far -fetched, refer -ring to some odd scrap of information which he has picked up in his wide reading, and the ordinary reader finds it difficult to trace and understand them. Finally, Browning wrote too much and revised too little. The time which he should have given to making one thought clear was used in expressing other thoughts that fitted through his head like a flock of swallows. His field was the individual soul, never exactly alike in any two men, and he sought to express the hidden motives and principles which govern individual action. In this field he is like a miner delving underground, sending up masses of mingled earth and ore; and the reader must sift all this material to separate the gold from the dross.
Here, certainly, are sufficient reasons for Browning's obscurity; and we must add the word that the fault seems unpardot, for the simple reason that Browning shows himself capable, at times, of writing directly, melodiously, and with noble simplicity.
He is not, like so many others, an entertaining poet. One cannot read him after dinner, or when settled in a comfortable easy chair. One must sit up, and think, and be alert when he reads Browning. If we accept these conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most stimulating port in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after reading him. And perhaps the best thing we can say of Browning is that his thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well- educated men and women.
His major works :
• Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
Paracelsus
Strafford (play) (1837)
Sordello (1840)
Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles
(play) (1842)
Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
Porphyria's Lover
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
My Last Duchess
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Count Gismond
Johannes Agricola in Meditation
Here I want to put few lines of his work,
“One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho’ right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are buffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
~ Epilogue, Browning
In 1834 he accompanied the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general, on a brief visit to St Petersburg and began Paracelsus, which was published in 1835. Browning's reputation began to make a partial recovery with the publication, 1841–1846, of Bells and Pomegranates, a series of eight pamphlets, originally intended just to include his plays. Fortunately his publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to include some "dramatic lyrics", some of which had already appeared in periodicals.
Conclusion:
In short , I just want to say that Victorian period is also a promoted through the English development and it’s connect their roots with Renaissance time. Tennyson & Browning both are distinguish poet that given their much contribution in literature writing in this era.
Thank you..........
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