Eight Victorian Poets by F. L. Lucas
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930
If you are a book accumulator like myself, you no doubt have many books such as this lying around your house: picked up for a song, on a subject you like (or would like to know more about), and put in the pile to read "one day". Well, for Eight Victorian Poets, that day has come, and on balance it was worth the time to read.
Frank Lucas was a well-known critic and commentator in his day, and was famous for his scathing review of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, although his real expertise was in poetry of earlier eras: it's important to keep in mind that, having been published in 1930, Eight Victorian Poets was discussing near contemporaries, not an era ancient to the author. In fact Lucas points out that several of the poets discussed died not many years previous to the publication date of this book (which, from the introduction, I take to have originally been radio broadcasts).
Lucas has written short, quite personal essays on what he saw as major poets of the Victorian era: Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Swinburne, and Thomas Hardy. Whether by design or chance his chosen subjects range across most of Victoria's reign, and so we see the "development" of poesy through that time (if indeed development is the correct term).
In dealing with Tennyson and Browning, Lucas compares and contrasts their styles - Tennyson the great evoker of scenery, where Browning was much more concerned with people rather than places. Both are to be enjoyed, in Lucas's opinion, in fragments rather than by trying to read their longer poems in one sitting: Browning in particular he exposes as hard to understand at times. Both he considers failed themselves when they turned too much toward preaching rather than the music of poetry, with both becoming lost in their fame and the adulation they received from a sometimes too credulous public.
Lucas moves to discussing Arnold, whom he considers had a great art, but repressed it because he felt that it was too frivolous a thing to be writing poetry when there was so much more to do in the world. He compares this to Clough, who's art was destroyed by his engagement with big questions (faith, love), which left him little time to be much more than a dilettante, but one with much talent.
Rossetti in some ways Lucas sees as a pivotal figure of the period, the one who brings the "passionate South", into the cooler "Northern" air of Victorian poetry. While he became a bruised personality, he worked hard on the art of poetry, rather than concentrating on moralism or preaching like Tennyson and Browing.
In Morris, Lucas sees a poet somewhere between the extremes he has previously delineated, one who did use his talent wisely in his verse. He likes Morris's fecundity in all things, and while not suggesting all his work was successful, the following quote sums up his feelings for the work - "Between the fireside glitter of societies like Pope's and the sun-blinded vapours of souls like Shelley's, lies a middle sphere. In it are found reason without insensitiveness and imagination without unreality, sense without hardness and deep feeling without sentiment; in it the greatest name is Shakespeare, and far from the least is William Morris."
His final two studies, Swinburne and Hardy, are again contrasts for Lucas: whereas Rossetti was "driven mad" by Victorianism, Swinburne was "eaten up" by it, barely surviving his first foray into poetry, and, as a poet, never really moving beyond his initial youthful exuberance, Lucas portrays him as "childish and cruel", his poetry showing a want of proportion and experience, judgement and restraint. While his music as a poet was sublime, he mostly had nothing to say - he failed to ripen.
Hardy on the other hand, he portrays as never being "young" - ruthlessly truthful all the time, he had no need for sentiment or flowing adjectives. His sincerity and intellectual honesty shine out in his poetry - "There are poets like Tennyson who think of Beauty before Truth; they tend to produce poetry that is perfect rather than great: and there are poets like Hardy who have a feeling for Truth even before Beauty; these tend to produce poetry that is great rather than perfect."
This book is a pithy introduction to these poets, with Lucas providing a pithy introduction about the value of reading verse over succumbing to science - Lucas enjoins us to read and enjoy, and enjoy just for enjoyment's sake. Which is what I'm heading off to do right now.
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