Victorian Poetry

The Romantic movement was dominated by poets, but the Victorian age is better known for its novels. Still, poetry was an important and popular form of literature for the educated public, and some of England's best-known poets come from this time period. Browning's reputation was growing as a poet in the 1830s, while that of her friend Alfred Tennyson was being established as that of the greatest poet of the era. A successor to Keats and Shelley, Tennyson at first lent his remarkable lyric talent to highly subjective verse. Then he turned to the public issues of the day and introduced two new poetic techniques. One is that of the dramatic monologue, also developed by Robert Browning, and the other is the English idyll, which combines glimpses of the contemporary scene with a casual debate. Later in his career, Tennyson built long poems out of short...