Students who study the Victorian novel, the most important literary form to emerge from the period, will find a mood of despair, loss, sadness, and a personal vision of suffering that was not obvious in the literature of the Romantic period. While the poetry of Byron, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth defined the dominant literary form of that day, the poets of the Victorian era were nonetheless as important in their honest reflections as the social-minded novels of that time, especially in the work of Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, and Hardy. The poets of Queen Victoria's age were perhaps often guided by a kind of despair, much of which resulted from the rapid changes taking place, that daily reminded them of their close proximity with suffering and death and the concomitant hopelessness of it. When Victoria's Albert died in 1861, Tennyson became her favorite poet, and his tribute of loss and regret to Arthur Hallam in the poem "In Memoriam" became her favorite text. It was not only Victoria who identified with Tennyson's loss; it was all of Britain and possibly the entire English-speaking world who had read Tennyson's work and recognized their own suffering through his. Imagery and Tone of Poetry Today the voices of Victorian poets such as Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, and Emily Bronte continue to project to modern readers that same message of loss and sadness, a wistful remembrance of what was and what will never be again, and too little hope for more.
Because the language of poetry often pierces the reader's heart with its vivid imagery and tone, the poems of the Victorian period may dispatch a swifter interpretation of the general condition of the masses than its more popular and well-known nineteenth century novel. Two Centuries Full of Contradictions It is easy to imagine a society in which upheaval might deserve to be its mark of identification. Consider this. A composite landscape spans significant changes that take place in every institution while deregulation of business practices creates huge amounts of wealth, the poor conversely finding their lot in life even worse than it was. Farmers are suffering while the cost of feeding families, urban or otherwise, is ever-increasing. Technology reduces the meaning of life for many to a struggle for survival. Depredation becomes the mantra for the chronic poverty of much of the working class. Yes, one might indeed imagine life as it is in the twenty-first century, full of contradictions, but this particular picture is Victorian Britain. A Modern Look at Victorian Poets A.S. Byatt, winner of England's Booker Prize, compares Nathaniel Hawthorne's preface in The House of the Seven Gables to her novel of the search for truth about the lives of fictional Victorian poets, Possession, published in 1990. There is in both, as Hawthorne observes about his own writing, "... an attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us."
What makes this comparison possible, of course, is the notion that history repeats itself. Byatt, who, like Hawthorne, calls her novel a romance, delivers a brilliantly told tale of a modern couple, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, obsessed with discovering the secrets of a celebrated Victorian poet and his lover, also a poet. Concurrently, the pair of scholars has their own unhappy history with love that makes them too cautious and wary of opening their hearts to any possibility of love between them, sufficiently mimicking the sense of regret echoed brilliantly in much of Victorian poetry. Love, Loss and Regret As the reader follows Byatt's path of parallel stories set in two different centuries, she finds that both couples fear "burning in the flames" of love.11aa It is through following all the clues in the newly uncovered letters and journals that unravel the truth about the nineteenth century poets that they discover not only their own willingness to give love another chance, with each other, but also the personal connections to the nineteenth century poets, especially for Maud who discovers that she is the descendant of both Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash. While Christabel and Ash accept the inevitable loss in their love relationship that is doomed from the start, the modern Roland and Maud choose to begin, despite their own complex and unfulfilled history with relationships, a different path.
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