Victorian Poetry

Paper Summary:

For the Victorians, poetry was a vibrant expression of the era's values and its fears. The paper analyzes two poems from the Victorian period which reflect these values. The first shows the era's intense occupation with status and social hierarchy in Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church". The poem demonstrates how this obsession with people's position in the world merged into an obsession with death and the dead, with death as a force that erased the status that people strove so hard to create and uphold in life. The second paper analyzed in this paper is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny", in which we see how the notions of status and propriety that governed Victorian life and death created such a terrible psychological pressure on the Victorians that they had at times to escape into lascivious fantasy.

From the Paper:

"The contrast is not simply that, however, of the upright and virtuous life against the scandalous and criminal one (for Rossetti makes it clear in the opening lines that Jenny is a prostitute) but that between male and female worlds. Life for the Victorians was divided into strictly separated spheres: The worlds of men and women touching upon each other barely more than the worlds of life and death. This poem is in part an expression of regret at this latter divide."

More papers on Victorian Poetry:

• Analytical Essay # 59648 : "Love in Victorian Poetry"
• Analytical Essay # 45868 : "The Forgotten Victorian Modernists"
• Analytical Essay # 34087 : "William Wordsworth's Poetry"

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