The Transition Period from Romanticism to Victorianism
In the 1830s the last years of the Romantic Era, there happened certain changes in English politics and culture. For example, Queen Victoria was enthroned in 1837, and the great Romantic poets like Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth were dead.
The poets in this era dealt with the social problems and the materialism of the coming industrial society. It was also known as the "Age of Transition".
Victorianism, which follows Romanticism was very famous for its seriousness and its moral strictness.
The most famous poets of this era like Clare, Arnold, Swinburne and Tennyson often dealt with the topics of violence, time and loss in their poems, which were often based on personal experiences. But we can also recognize that Tennyson wanted to describe a beautiful and lost world, as if he wanted to forget reality (Industrialisation). The loss of safety at that time made some poets withdraw into another world, a world of art. "Art for art’s sake" or pure aestheticism was what the poetry turned out to be as one can see from the example of Swinburne.
In contrast to their isolated Romantic predecessors, some of the Victorian poets began to get into closer contact with their readers. This is especially true of Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Verfasser dieses und der zugehörigen Artikel: Ute Quinkert, Sandra Müller