Thesis Proposal

A Comparative Analysis of Romantic and Victorian Poetry

Table of Contents

Introduction2

Thesis Statement2

Discussion2

Romantic Peotry2

Victorian Peotry3

Transition from Romantic Peotry to Victorian Peotry5

Poets in the Romantic and Victorian Eras6

Conclusion7

A Comparative Analysis of Romantic and Victorian Poetry

Introduction

Literature has been one of the most important links in the chain of transfer of knowledge and experience in different societies that have been developed over the centuries. The purpose of this paper is to expand our boundaries of our knowledge by exploring relevant facts and figures related to Romantic and Victorian Poetry. Here, we would be analyzing the characteristics of both styles of poetry and stating the work of famous poets (Furst, 1980, 105-117).

Thesis Statement

How identity and doubt are expressed in romantic and Victorian poetry comparing ways and Techniques in those two eras?

Discussion

Romantic Peotry

Romantic ideas, imported from Germany, France and then quickly crossed the Channel to get to Britain, they intermarried with the English tradition and engendered a literary movement quite distinct from German Romanticism. It arises when a string of poets who succeeded and coasted and that it is important to distinguish the main figures (Hoffman & Hynes 1963, pp. 98 - 167).

In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that can be dated as beginning with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and that is still continuing today, despite reactions and countermovements which begin almost immediately and which are highly relevant to any consideration of Victorianand modern literature. (Although romanticism includes all of William Blake's major poetry, beginning more than a decade prior to Lyrical Ballads, Blake's obscurity limited his influence on other major writers for a good half century.) (Trilling & Bloom, 2003, pp. 87-105).

Paradoxically, though, these reactions can themselves be regarded as highly romantic in nature—partly, perhaps, because one very general but still useful early (1825) definition ofromanticism is, in the words of the French dramatist and politician Ludovic Vitet (1802-73), "Protestantism in arts and letters" (quoted in Furst, European Romanticism).

Mill's account shows the extent to which romanticism was central to Victorian literary attitudes, even as the heyday of what came to be called high romanticism came to an end in England with the beginning of the Victorian period. Indeed, the Victorian parody of the continued influence of romanticism identified what it called the "spasmodic school" of poetry (see the poems of Digby Mackworth Dobell for examples of what William Edmonstoune Aytoun ridiculed under that name) (Furst, 1980, 105-117).

Victorian Peotry

"Victorian poetry" is a term that does not quite coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign that began with the death of her uncle, William IV, in 1837 and lasted until her own death some 63 years later on January 22, 1901. The great poets who wrote most or all of their work while she was queen (and later, starting in 1876, empress of India) include Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and ...