Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a
playwright in the 1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello (1840).
Browning found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume
Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new manner: they involve the
reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or unconventional
minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the processes of moral
judgment and self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love
poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora
Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her
Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a
subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one
of the century’s most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the
most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism. Hand in hand with this reassuring
creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such
poems as “Caliban upon Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning’s
work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849),
combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The
title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the
modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the
dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a
more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-
Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and
became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three
highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse
novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published
posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable
closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness,
unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He
continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary
age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea
of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle
opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing,
in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day
Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire
economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in
Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged
an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin
took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and
force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto
This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry
Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts
for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the
Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is
memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great
autobiographies of this introspective century.
