Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
37 - Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
The best-known poets of the late Victorian period were quick to mythologise themselves. ‘Go from me: I am one of those, who fall’, Lionel Johnson wrote in his poem ‘Mystic and Cavalier’ of 1889. ‘The day is overworn’, Ernest Dowson declared ten years later, ‘And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown; / Despair and death.’ W. B. Yeats, encouraged by such utterances, would commemorate his literary friends of the 1890s as a ‘Tragic Generation’. Drink, drugs, sexual misadventure, melancholy and self-neglect did indeed bring some writers to early deaths or breakdowns, and experiences of this kind were often the topics of their poetry. ‘I think’, Yeats speculated, ‘that perhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which has no relation to any public interest, gathered together overwrought, unstable men.’ An ageing monarch and a century approaching its end intensified this sensation of decay. After the title of a play by the French dramatists F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard had made the phrase fin de siècle familiar in 1888, it was eagerly adopted as the label for a variety of contemporary assumptions, all of them in one way or another pessimistic, disillusioned or morally antinomian.
The consequence has been a tendency to see the poetry of this period, either as a sinister dead-end, or as a mere ‘transition’ between the more significant achievements of the High Victorian and Modernist eras. At the time many writers understood it rather differently.
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- The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 686 - 705Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
References
, Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s, revised edition (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981).Google Scholar
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, ‘Schopenhauer and Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’, PMLA, 47:1 (1932).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ed. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, general editor, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
ed. ‘Hap’; Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
ed. ‘A Last Word’, in Poems of Ernest Dowson, (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).
ed. The Letters of A. E. Housman, (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1971).
ed. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 49, lines 64–70.
ed. Poetical Works of Lord Byron, (London: Oxford University Press, 1921).
, Etudes de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (Brussels: L. Hauman, 1834).Google Scholar
ed. A. E. Housman: Collected Poems & Selected Prose, (London: Penguin, 1989).
ed. The Poems of Tennyson, (London: Longmans, 1969).
ed. Poems and Some Letters of James Thomson, (London: Centaur Press, 1963).
ed. ‘The Poems of William Blake’, in The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose of James Thomson (B. V.), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
and ed. The Poems of Samuel Johnson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
ed. ’Nineties, (London: Dent, 1971).
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