Essay on Victorian Poetry

Elizabeth Barrett Browning composed Sonnet 43 throughout the prime of the Victorian Period, which lasted the duration of Queen Victoria's throne between 1832 and 1901. Like a few of the works throughout the Victorian duration, Sonnet 43 was a reflective piece about the love of her life, Robert Browning. Elizabeth Browning showed this reflection by addressing her own posing question, "How do I enjoy thee?" William Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 however, was written throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, between…...

This Victorian poem is about the narrator (a fallen woman), the Lord and Kate. It is a ballad which tells the story from the narrator’s perspective about being shunned by society after her ‘experiences’ with the lord. The poem’s female speaker recalls her contentment in her humble surroundings until the local ‘Lord of the Manor’ took her to be his lover. He discarded her when she became pregnant and his affections turned to another village girl, Kate, whom he then…...

Victorian poetry is often characterized as one being a hybrid of the classical literature and the medieval literature of England. It was supposed to bridge the Romantic and Modernist eras of poetry (Bristow, 2000). Some poems often talk about the chivalry of the knights, as if they wanted the knight to regain the people of England’s high regard for them, but most of the works focus on more serious issues like prostitution, child labour and other social injustices. Thomas Hardy…...

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a Modernist literary figure, part of a cultural movement which involved innovation and experimentation with art and literature as a reaction against industrialisation, war and the formality and optimism of the Victorian period. Eliot's Preludes was written in England early in his poetic career - sometime around 1911. It encompasses many of the techniques and styles of modernist poetry by concerning the degradation of society, spirit (religion) and quality of life due to the thirst for…...