OTHER POETS
1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), whose maiden name was Elizabeth Barrett, was the daughter of a West India planter, and was born at Durham. She began to write poems at the age of eight; her first published work worth mentioning was An Essay on Mind (1826), which is of slight importance. When she was about thirty years old delicate health prostrated her, and for the rest of her life she was almost an invalid. In 1846, when she was forty, she and Robert Browning were married, and stole off to Italy, where they made Florence their headquarters. She was a woman of acute sensibilities, and was fervid in the support of many good causes, one of which was the attainment of Italian independence. On the death of Wordsworth in 1850 it was suggested that the Laureateship should be conferred upon her, but the project fell through. After a very happy married life she died at Florence.
Only the chief of her numerous poetical works can be mentioned here. After her first work noted above there was a pause of nine years; then appeared Prometheus Bound (1835). Other works are The Seraphim (1838), Sonnets from the Portuguese (1846), Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1857), an immense poem in blank verse, and Last Poems (1861). She wrote many of her shorter pieces for magazines, the most important contributions being The Cry of the Children (1841) for Blackwood’s and The Great God Pan (1860) for the Cornhill. As a narrative poet Mrs. Browning is a comparative failure, for in method she is discursive and confused, but she has command of a sweet, clear, and often passionate style. She has many slips of taste, and her desire for elevation sometimes leads her into what Rossetti called “falsetto masculinity,” a kind of hysterical bravado.
2. Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was a writer of many activities, but it is chiefly as a poet that he now holds his place in literature. He was the son of the famous headmaster of Rugby, and was educated at Winchester, Rugby, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained the Newdigate Prize for poetry. Subsequently he became a Fellow of Oriel College (1845). In 1851 he was appointed an inspector of schools, and proved to be a capable official. His life was busily uneventful, and in 1886 he resigned, receiving a pension from the Government. Less than two years afterward he died suddenly of heart disease.
His poetical works are not very bulky. The Strayed Reveller (1848) appeared under the nom de plume of “A”; then followed Empedocles on Etna (1853), Poems (1854), and New Poems (1868). None of these volumes is of large size, though much of the content is of a high quality. For subject Arnold is fond of classical themes, to which he gives a meditative and even melancholy cast common in modern compositions. In some of the poems—as, for example, in the nobly pessimistic Scholar-Gipsy—he excels in the description of typical English scenery. In style he has much of the classical stateliness and more formal type of beauty, but he can be graceful and charming, with sometimes the note of real passion. His meditative poetry, like Dover Beach and A Summer Night, resembles that of Gray in its subdued melancholy resignation, but all his work is careful, scholarly, and workmanlike.
His prose works are large in bulk and wide in range. Of them all his critical essays are probably of the highest value. Essays in Criticism (1865) contains the best of his critical work, which is marked by wide reading and careful thought. His judgment, usually admirably sane and measured, is sometimes distorted a little by his views on life and politics. Arnold also wrote freely upon theological and political themes, but these were largely topics of the day, and his works on such subjects have no great permanent value. His best books of this class are Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Literature and Dogma (1873).
3. Edward Fitzgerald (1809–83), like Thomas Gray, lives in general literature by one poem. This, after long neglect, came to be regarded as one of the great things in English literature. He was a man of original views and retiring habits, and spent most of his life in his native Suffolk. In 1859 he issued the Rubáiyát of the early Persian poet Omar Khayyám. His version is a very free translation, cast into curious four-lined stanzas, which have an extraordinary cadence, rugged yet melodious, strong yet sweet. The feeling expressed in the verses, with much energy and picturesque effect, is stoical resignation. Fitzgerald also wrote a prose dialogue of much beauty called Euphranor (1851); and his surviving letters testify to his quiet and caustic humor.
4. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) was born at Liverpool, and educated at Rugby, where Dr. Arnold made a deep impression upon his mind. He proceeded to Oxford, where, like his friend Matthew Arnold, he later became a Fellow of Oriel College. He traveled much, and then became Warden of University Hall, London. This post he soon resigned, and some public appointments followed. He died at Florence, after a long pilgrimage to restore his failing health. His death was bewailed by Arnold in his beautiful elegy Thyrsis.
Clough’s first long poem was The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), which is written in rough classical hexameters and contains some fine descriptions of the Scottish Highlands. He wrote little else of much value. His Amours de Voyage (1849) is also in hexameters; Dipsychus (1850) is a meditative poem. His poetry is charged with much of the deep-seated unrest and despondency that mark the work of Arnold. His lyrical gift is not great, but once at least, in the powerful Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth, he soared into greatness.
5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) was the eldest of the Pre-Raphaelite school of artists and poets. He himself was both artist and poet. He was the son of an Italian refugee, and early became an artist. In art, as in poetry, he broke away from convention when he saw fit. His poetical works are small in bulk, consisting of two slight volumes, Poems (1870) and Ballads and Sonnets (1881).
Of the high quality of these poems there can be little question. With a little more breadth of view, and with perhaps more of the humane element in him, he might have found a place among the very highest. For he had real genius, and in The Blessed Damozel his gifts are fully displayed: a gift for description of almost uncanny splendor, a brooding and passionate introspection, often of a religious nature, and a verbal beauty as studied and melodious as that of Tennyson—less certain and decisive perhaps, but surpassing that of the older poet in unearthly suggestiveness. In his ballads, like Rose Mary and Troy Town, the same powers are apparent, though in a lesser degree; these have in addition a power of narrative that is only a very little short of the greatest. An extract appears on p. [515].
6. Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–94) was a younger sister of the poet last named, and survived him by some years. Her life was uneventful, like her brother’s, and was passed chiefly in London.
Her bent was almost entirely lyrical, and was shown in Goblin Market (1862), The Prince’s Progress (1866), A Pageant (1881), and Verses (1892). Another volume, called New Poems (1896), was published after her death, and contains much excellent early work. Her poetry, perhaps less impressive than that of her brother in its descriptive passages, has a purer lyrical note of deep and sustained passion, with a somewhat larger command of humor, and a gift of poetical expression as noble and comprehensive as his own. They resemble each other in a curious still undertone of passionate religious meditation joined to a fine simplicity of diction.
7. William Morris (1834–96) produced a great amount of poetry, and was one of the most conspicuous figures in mid-Victorian literature. He was born near London, the son of a wealthy merchant, and was educated at Marlborough and Oxford. His wealth, freeing him from the drudgery of a profession, permitted him to take a lively and practical interest in the questions of his day. Upon art, education, politics, and social problems his great energy and powerful mind led him to take very decided views, sometimes of an original nature. Here we are concerned only with his achievement in literature.
At an early period he was drawn into the Pre-Raphaelite movement, for he was keenly alive to its studied beauty and rather extreme medievalism. The Defence of Guenevere (1858), written in this manner, was received with neglect. The poems are laboriously fantastic, but they show great beauty and a sense of restrained passion. The Life and Death of Jason (1866) is a long narrative poem on a familiar theme, written in the heroic couplet in a manner suggestive of Chaucer, but easy and melodious to an extent that makes the tale almost monotonous. The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) develops this narrative method still further, and is a collection of twenty-four tales on various subjects of classical and medieval origin. In meter the poems vary, but the couplet is prominent. In range and vivacity the work is extraordinary, and the framework into which the tales are set is both ingenious and beautiful. Poems by the Way (1891) contains some fine miscellaneous pieces. A brief extract from his poems will be found on p. [514].
Morris also busied himself with the composition of long prose tales, produced in great quantity during the later years of his life. The tales are written in a curious headlong, semi-rhythmical, semi-archaic style. Much reading of it tends to give the reader mental indigestion, but the vigor and skill of the prose are very considerable. Some of the tales are The House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), and The Sundering Flood (1898).
8. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) had a long life and his poetical work was in proportion to it. Of aristocratic lineage, he was educated at Eton and Oxford. He left Oxford (1860) without taking a degree, and for the rest of his life wrote voluminously, if not always judiciously. He was a man of quick attachments and violent antagonisms, and these features of his character did much to vitiate his prose criticisms, of which he wrote a large number. In his later years, from 1879 onward, he lived with his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton at Putney Hill, where he died.
Atalanta in Calydon (1865), an attempt at an English version of an ancient Greek tragedy, was his first considerable effort in poetic form, and it attracted notice at once. At a bound the young poet had attained to a style of his own: tuneful and impetuous movement, a cunning metrical craftsmanship, and a mastery of melodious diction. The excess of these virtues was also its bane, leading to diffuseness, breathlessness, and incoherence. Poems and Ballads (1866), a second extraordinary book, was, owing to its choice of unconventional subjects, criticized as being wicked. In it the Swinburnian features already mentioned are revealed in a stronger fashion. Only a few of his later poetical works can be mentioned here: Songs before Sunrise (1871), a collection of poems chiefly in praise of Italian liberty, some of them of great beauty, but marred by his reckless defiance of the common view; Erectheus (1876), a further and less successful effort at Greek tragedy; and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), a narrative of much passion and force, composed in the heroic couplet. Some of his shorter poems were reproduced in two further series of Poems and Ballads in 1878 and 1889, but they are inferior to those of his prime.
Swinburne wrote a large number of plays, of which the most noteworthy are The Queen Mother and Rosamond (1860), with which he began his career as an author; three plays on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots, called Chastelard (1865), Bothwell (1874), and Mary Stuart (1881); Locrine (1887); and The Sisters (1892). The gifts of Swinburne are lyrical rather than dramatic, and his tragedies, like those of most of his contemporaries, are only of literary importance. His blank verse is strongly phrased, and in drama his diffuseness—that desire for mere sound and speed which was his greatest weakness—has little scope.
9. Arthur Edward O’Shaughnessy (1844–81) was born in London, of Irish descent. In 1861 he joined the staff of the British Museum Library, where a promising career was cut short by his early death. He wrote little, and his books came close upon each other: The Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), Music and Moonlight (1874), and Songs of a Worker (1881), the last appearing after his death. His longer poems have a certain haziness and incoherence, but the shorter pieces have a musical and attractive style and a certain half-mystical wistfulness. His ode beginning “We are the music-makers” is often quoted, and other poems quite as good are A Neglected Heart and Exile.