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11-12.RI.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text,

including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the

meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text.

This is the primary standard we will be focusing on in our unit on Victorian Poetry, which will highlight some of the Victorian Era's most influential poets. The unit's goal is for students to understand where poetry has been so that they may understand where poetry is now.

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How do authors’ choices regarding words, point of view, structure, and use of rhetoric advance the

author’s purpose and affect readers’ ability to comprehend the text?

Why is it necessary to analyze how style and content create effective rhetoric?

How do these choices affect the message of the text?

With poetry specifically in mind, how does each part of a poem (word choice, point of view, form

and structure, rhetoric, rhyme and meter (or lack thereof), syllables, message/moral) play an

integral role in the process of piecing together the whole text?

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11-12.W.3: Write narratives or other creative texts to develop real or imagined

experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event

sequences.

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What are the different purposes and types of writing, and how do writers structure and support

different types of writing?

Why is it important to adjust the text type according to the purpose of the writing?

How do specific types of writing forms (like poetry) communicate meaning in different ways?

How does poetry utilize emotion to transmit a meaningful message?

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"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (beautifully read by Jonathan Roumie)

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"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (beautifully read by Jonathan Roumie)

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Gerard Manley Hopkins is my favorite poet, and one of the most prolific Victorian authors. Here is a beautiful reading of his poem "As Kingfishers Catch Fire", which we will be going through as a class.

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“As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins - Classic Poetry with Jonathan Roumie

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"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (beautifully read by John Neville)

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"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (beautifully read by John Neville)

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Whew. This poem is deep, and difficult, and somber. We can still feel its message echoing through the centuries, whispering soft warnings and hard reminders.

"Dover Beach" is the quintessential Victorian Poem; we will find out why when we enter into its churning depths together.

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Matthew Arnold - 'Dover Beach' read by John Neville in 1959.

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As you read/listen to the poem, consider this photograph.

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Compare "A Triad" by Christina Rossetti and "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Compare "A Triad" by Christina Rossetti and "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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These two sonnets are both about love, but--at least at first glance--they could not be more different. One is a proclamation by a woman who loves so purely and deeply--an almost impossible kind of love, at least by human standards. She proclaims: "I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight / For the ends of Being and ideal Grace" (3-5). The other is an exasperated lament about three women who "sang of love together" (1). Nothing good comes from this song: "One shamed herself in love; one temperately / Grew gross and soulless in love, a sluggish wife; / One famished died for love... (9-11).

We will explore more in class.

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This stirring first paragraph of The Poetry Foundation's introduction to the Victorian Era seems a fitting one to include here.

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This stirring first paragraph of The Poetry Foundation's introduction to the Victorian Era seems a fitting one to include here.

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“The sea is calm tonight,” observes the somber speaker of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), listening to “the grating roar / Of pebbles” at the shore, “The eternal note of sadness” over the waters. In Arnold’s mid-19th-century Britain, another metaphorical sea, “The Sea of Faith,” was ebbing irretrievably: “But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; once seemingly “So various, so beautiful, so new,” Arnold’s world had “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” More than a century and a half after its publication, “Dover Beach” remains a durable expression of Victorian poetics: its intricate patterning and stagy theatrics, its nostalgia for simpler times, and its uncertainties about an increasingly mechanized modernity. Arnold once wrote that “poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” an enterprise of the utmost artistic and moral stakes. Over the course of Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901), Arnold and his contemporary British poets criticized contemporary life amid its epochal changes: the radical ideas of evolution and materialism, shifting understandings of gender and class, and an economic and industrial explosion that helped make the British Empire the largest in history.

-The Editors of The Poetry Foundation

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"The sea is calm tonight," observes the somber speaker of Matthew Arnold's " Dover Beach " (1867), listening to "the grating roar / Of pebbles" at the shore, "The eternal note of sadness" over the waters. In Arnold's mid-19th-century Britain, another metaphorical sea, "The Sea of Faith," was ebbing irretrievably: "But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"; once seemingly "So various, so beautiful, so new," Arnold's world had "really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." More than a century and a half after its publication, "Dover Beach" remains a durable expression of Victorian poetics: its intricate patterning and stagy theatrics, its nostalgia for simpler times, and its uncertainties about an increasingly mechanized modernity. Arnold once wrote that "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life," an enterprise of the utmost artistic and moral stakes. Over the course of Queen Victoria's long reign (1837-1901), Arnold and his contemporary British poets criticized contemporary life amid its epochal changes: the radical ideas of evolution and materialism, shifting understandings of gender and class, and an economic and industrial explosion that helped make the British Empire the largest in history.

When we remember Victorian literature, we might think immediately of the three-volume novels of the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens, the extravagant comedies of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and the unforgettable fictional characters-Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Lewis Carroll's little Alice, Bram Stoker's Dracula-who populate world culture to this day. But in 19th-century Britain, poetry was as prestigious as ever: thanks to advances in literacy and publishing, poetry had never been read by a wider audience (from schoolchildren to Queen Victoria herself) or been more profitable commercially. Books by the most popular poets routinely sold out through several editions.

Victorian poetry's most distinctive qualities may stem, paradoxically, from its proximity to other genres and forms: theater, fiction, music, and art, all of them poetry's competitors in a fully stocked cultural marketplace. Asking in the 1833 essay "What Is Poetry?" the philosopher John Stuart Mill responded with terms pilfered from drama: "Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude. ... All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy." In the era's most heralded poetic innovation, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning hybridized drama, fiction, and lyric into the dramatic monologue form: a poet impersonates a fictional or historical character and addresses a silent audience without any narrative framing or guidance. Visually minded poets-including the poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the writer-designer William Morris, both associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-pushed poetry toward the picturesque, relishing pictorial detail and painterly embellishments. Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote lyrically lush poems that aspired toward music, delighting in mesmerizing meters, (such as Hopkins's invention, sprung rhythm) and virtuosic braids of alliteration and rhyme.

When Victorian poets looked back into literary history, they uncovered roles fit for dramatic reenactment in myth, Arthurian legend, and the plays of William Shakespeare. And they peered up close at the inspired poets of British Romanticism, their immediate predecessors, whose radical fervor and imaginative boundlessness they were too sourly skeptical to re-create. When poets looked forward, they saw a depersonalized future in which (in the words of Tennyson's " Locksley Hall") "the individual withers, and the world is more and more." That expanding, stifling "world" saw innumerable advances in the natural and social sciences. None were more earthshaking than evolution or Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, introduced in his landmark book On the Origin of Species (1859) and applied to human evolution in (1871); his designer-less account of life precipitated a crisis of religious disbelief. If one reaction to that apparently senseless world was the world-weariness of Tennyson and Arnold and later Thomas Hardy, another was the redoubling of a newly urgent religious poetry, ranging from the plain, impassioned, devotional verse of Christina Rossetti to Hopkins's riveting spontaneity. Still another reaction was an embrace of senselessness in the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson): a master draftsman and a mathematician, respectively, who both brought to English poetry not only their learning but also reveries and comic disproportions, gleeful non sequiturs, and bewitching neologisms such as "runcible spoon" and "frabjous day."

This period of tumultuous change at home was also the peak of England's so-called imperial century. Accelerated by the Second Industrial Revolution and the transformative technologies of the steamship and telegraph, the British Empire embarked on a period of unrivaled naval and military expansion, colonization and competition, and global trade. By the end of Victoria's reign, the Empire encompassed territories on every continent but Antarctica, living up to its hyperbolic epithet: "the empire on which the sun never set."

Britain's imperial reach affected Victorian poets of all styles and subjects: their poems responded to headline news explicitly-Tennyson's " The Charge of the Light Brigade"-or translated it to allegory-Christina Rossetti's " Goblin Market" Notoriously, some poems cheered on racist imperialism-Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden." Others answered mounting desires for exotica and Eastern themes, such as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald's translations of quatrains by the 11th- and 12th-century Persian astronomer and poet. As white men exercised power over the globe, back in England, women were expected to meet the domestic, self-sacrificing ideal of "the angel in the house" (the title of Coventry Patmore's once everywhere-read, now everywhere-bemoaned, poem). Yet no previous era in English poetry boasted more models of women poets, from the feminist reinventions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the pseudonymous personae of Emily Brontë (published under the pen name Ellis Bell) and the collaborative pair of Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, writing together under the name Michael Field.

To early-20th-century , with its fixation on moral and cultural decadence, transgressions of norms around identity and sexuality, and esteem for the artistic values of difficulty and compression. "Art for art's sake," an English translation of the French motto " modernists who defined their art in opposition, and even to contemporary readers, the adjective Victorian can connote prudishness, moralizing, or outmoded conventionality. But late Victorian poetry looks forward to Modernism's estrangements and extremes l'art pour l'art," crystallized the late-19th-century doctrine of aestheticism, which swerved away from nihilistic despair over life's meaninglessness by wagering everything on the meanings made within art. Aestheticism's most eloquent proponent was the critic Walter Pater: "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," he concludes in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873); "we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more," so "our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time." With his teaching and rhapsodic prose alone, Pater emerged as an important influence on his former students Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who transformed aestheticist principles into verse-lines of overpowering sensation and ardent queer eroticism.

The following poets, poems, guides, articles, and recordings survey the many poetries springing up during the Victorian era. Included are laureates and bestsellers, as well as marginalized poets recovered by 20th- and 21st-century readers. When read and reread, this already diverse era has become, over time, only more diverse: this introduction offers one snapshot of a vibrant, ever-changing period.

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An introduction to a period of seismic social change and poetic expansion.

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As you read, write, ponder, and discuss, prepare.

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As you read, write, ponder, and discuss, prepare.

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At the end of the unit, each one of you will write a poem of your own in the Victorian style, and give a short presentation about its significance. I encourage you to be brainstorming and considering as we dive in to the Era's most influential poems. Find a poet or poem or issue that especially touches you, and use it as inspiration. The issues that Victorian poets were wrestling with are in many ways the same issues we face today. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and read with curiosity, grace, and a sense of humor. You never know what beautiful things will come of that.

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Poetry is full of figurative language, and it is paramount that you strive to understand what the words and phrases of a given poem are doing. One word may change the tone of a poem. One phrase has the power to convey the message of a poem. Many Victorian poems are difficult precisely because of the ways they are worded. This is why it is so important to find words you know, cling to them, and keep them in mind as context and cornerstones of meaning as you look up words you do not know.