This is one of the most famous songs from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long narrative poem The Princess. In the poem’s context, the song is sung in public at the Princess’s command to pass a brief interval in the arduous studies…Read More ›
Poetry
The Sublime
The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas…Read More ›
Sprung Rhythm
This is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for his most characteristic and idiosyncratic poetic mode. Hopkins seemed to define it as organizing lines around stressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, the poetic foot always starts on a stressed syllable and may be…Read More ›
Analysis of Hopkins’s The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins regarded The Windhover as his best poem. It combines all his characteristic and idiosyncratic intensities with extraordinary verve and power. Hopkins focuses simultaneously on poetic form and on what that form itself represents—what its physical power may be…Read More ›
Victorian Poetry
“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…Read More ›
Romantic Poetry
The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that…Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most popular poem. It opened the 1798 first edition of Lyrical Ballads, where it first appeared; Coleridge revised it for the 1800 edition and undertook further revisions later, after his…Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight
Frost at Midnight is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most beautiful poems, It belongs to the genre he called “conversation poems” (in the subtitle to “The Nightingale”)—that is, poems in the style of a person talking to a listener, perhaps…Read More ›
Analysis of John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes
This is one of John Keats’s best-loved poems, with a wonderfully happy ending. Keats wrote it in late January 1819 (St. Agnes Day is January 21, and Keats seems to have started composition a few days before that). It is…Read More ›
Analysis of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach
Dover Beach is Matthew Arnold’s most famous poem, as well as one of the standard poems in all Victorian canons. It was written sometime between 1848 and 1851 but not published till 1867, when Arnold had essentially ceased writing poetry….Read More ›
Analysis of Lord Byron’s Don Juan
Don Juan is nowadays regarded as Byron’s crowning achievement and his greatest long poem. Unlike the Satanic self-dramatizing that was the source of his fame in the 19th century, in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage especially, Don Juan shows Byron…Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802) Dejection is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poems, and one of the greatest crisis lyrics of English romanticism. It is in a sense Coleridge’s answer to William Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, as well as to Wordsworth’s…Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush
The Darkling Thrush is one of Thomas Hardy’s characteristic poems of bleak despair over the world, natural and emotional. It is the last poem of the 19th century, or at least the last one to be discussed in this book,…Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Christabel
According to the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth agreed to divide their contributions to the joint volume, with Coleridge writing the “supernatural poems” and Wordsworth the natural ones—the scenes of everyday life. Coleridge’s contributions…Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper
The two chimney-sweeper poems in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience belong to the explicitly paired poems in the two books. In most of these pairings, the later song mounts a fiercer and more overt critique of the…Read More ›
Analysis of Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel
The Blessed Damozel is one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s earliest poems, as well as one of his greatest and best known. A quarter of a century after writing it at 18, Rossetti depicted its subject in one of his most…Read More ›
Stéphane Mallarmé and French Symbolism
It is no accident that references to the literary ideas and example of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) abound in contemporary literary criticism and theory. The great French poet’s notoriously refined aestheticism and fervent devotion to language led him to expound a…Read More ›
Symbolism
Symbolism, an aesthetic movement devoted primarily to discovering the true nature of poetry, originated in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, the central figures in the theory and practice of symbolism in…Read More ›
Romantic Literary Criticism
In 1832, at the end of what is now called the Romantic age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described “three silent revolutions in England: 1. When the Professions fell off from the Church; 2. When Literature fell off from the Professions; 3….Read More ›
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Accentual meter: A base meter in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by a stress determines the basic unit, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables. It is one of four base meters used in English (accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic,…Read More ›