LATE VICTORIAN POETRY

LATE VICTORIAN POETRY

Late Victorian Poetry to some extent overlaps with the poetry of the early Victorian phase, especially that of Tennyson and Browning. Its most distinct features are:

Reaction to moral and literary Victorian standards;

Continuation and modification of Romantic trends;

The seminal movement, in this sense, was the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood", founded in 1848 by the young painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and the sculpture Thomas Woolner, so called because they advocated a return to the purity of late Medieval Italian art, before the stylisation that set in with Raphael and his followers.

Their watchword was "Back to nature!" by which they meant a return to the simplicity tempered with mysticism of the Middle Ages, when spiritual values were held high and mechanisation had not yet destroyed individual creativity.

Pre-Raphaelite painters reacted to the academic style by infusing their work with a note of languorous sensuality and a symbolism, the repetition of certain motifs such as lilies and stars, mainly derived from literary sources such as Dante's Vita Nuova.

The Pre-Raphaelites also believed in great technical ability as an antidote to superficiality of feeling and expression. They were obsessed with the detailed reconstruction of reality.