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The post-Romantic and Victorian eras > Late Victorian literature > Verse

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 and unofficially reinforced a decade later, was founded as a group of painters but also functioned as a school of writers who linked the incipient Aestheticism of Keats and De Quincey to the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle. Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his early writing in Poems (1870), a volume that led the critic Robert Buchanan to attack him as the leader of The Fleshly School of Poetry. Rossetti combined some subtle treatments of contemporary life with a new kind of medievalism, seen also in The Defence of Guenevere (1858) by William Morris. The earnest political use of the Middle Ages found in Carlyle and Ruskin did not die out—Morris himself continued it and linked it, in the 1880s, with Marxism. But these writers also used medieval settings as a context that made possible an uninhibited treatment of sex and violence. The shocking subject matter and vivid imagery of Morris's first volume were further developed by Algernon Charles Swinburne, who, in Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866), combined them with an intoxicating metrical power. His second series of Poems and Ballads (1878), with its moving elegies for Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, displays a sophisticated command of recent developments in avant-garde French verse.

The carefully wrought religious poetry of Christina Rossetti is perhaps truer to the original, pious purposes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), with its vivid but richly ambiguous title poem, established her status as one of the outstanding lyric poets of the century. The other outstanding religious poet of this period is Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest whose work was first collected as Poems in 1918, nearly 30 years after his death. Overpraised by Modernist critics, who saw him as the sole great poet of the era, he was in fact an important minor talent and an ingenious technical innovator.

Robert Browning's experiments with the dramatic monologue were further developed in the 1860s by Augusta Webster, who used the form in Dramatic Studies (1866), A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867), and Portraits (1870) to produce penetrating accounts of female experience. Her posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother & Daughter (1895) is a lucid and unsentimental account of that relationship.

The 1890s witnessed a flowering of lyric verse, influenced intellectually by the critic and novelist Walter Pater and formally by contemporary French practice. Such writing was widely attacked as “decadent” for its improper subject matter and its consciously amoral doctrine of “art for art's sake.” This stress upon artifice and the freedom of art from conventional moral constraints went hand in hand, however, with an exquisite craftsmanship and a devotion to intense emotional and sensory effects. Outstanding among the numerous poets publishing in the final decade of the century were John Davidson, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and A.E. Housman. In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Symons suggested the links between this writing and European Symbolism and Impressionism. Thompson provides a vivid example of the way in which a decadent manner could, paradoxically, be combined with fierce religious enthusiasm. A rather different note was struck by Rudyard Kipling, who combined polemical force and sharp observation (particularly of colonial experience) with a remarkable metrical vigour.

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