Andrea del Sarto But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? I’ll work… Read More ›
Victorian Literature
Analysis of Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi
Fra Lippo Lippi [Florentine painter, 1412-69] I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! You need not clap your torches to my face. Zooks, what’s to blame? you think you see a monk! What, ’tis past midnight, and you go the… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess
My Last Duchess FERRARA That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will’t please you sit… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters
The Lotos-Eaters represents one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s most extended experiments in, and demonstrations of, the sensual nature of poetry. Tennyson—heavily influenced by John Keats—was interested in testing the limits of poetic expression, and thus, more than most poets, he… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s Ulysses
Ulysses, a perennial favorite and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems, appeared in the 1842 volume of Poems that made Tennyson’s name. However, it was written at age 24, nine years earlier, after the death in 1833 of Arthur… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s In Memoriam
In Memoriam A.H.H. is one of the great elegies in English; rivaled perhaps only by John Milton’s Lycidas, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, possibly Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and some short poems by Milton and William Wordsworth…. Read More ›
Analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
Christina Rossetti claimed that Goblin Market was extemporized in a single day. She also called it a children’s poem, and for her it probably was since, like her romantic antecedents, she saw childhood as a time of unparalleled intensity and experience…. Read More ›
Analysis of Browning’s Aurora Leigh
Aurora Leigh is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most ambitious work. Both its very high poetic quality, when the poem is at its best, and its sometimes turgid moralizing, when it is at its worst, were noted by contemporary reviewers like George… Read More ›
Analysis of Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this wildly popular sonnet sequence, most famous for its penultimate sonnet— “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” (sonnet 43)—during Robert Browning’s courtship of her in 1845 and 1846. She only showed him… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears
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 ›
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 ›
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 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 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 ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
Dickens’s 10th novel, serialized weekly in Household Words (April 1–August 12, 1854), unillustrated. Published in one volume by Bradbury & Evans, 1854. This controversial book, the shortest of Dickens’s novels, takes up the issues of industrialism and education and offers… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
Dickens’s 13th novel, published in 36 weekly parts in All the Year Round (December 1, 1860–August 3, 1861), unillustrated. Published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall, 1861. A Bildungsroman narrated in the first person by its hero, Great Expectations… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
Dickens’s ninth novel, published in monthly parts in 1852–53, with illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, issued in one volume in 1853. Often characterized as the first of the late novels, Bleak House describes England as a bleak house, devastated by… Read More ›
Victorian Literary Criticism
Victorian literary theory, sometimes dismissed as a hinterland, is a remarkably diverse and productive field. Of the four lines of theorizing identified by the philosopher of art Francis Sparshott in Theory of the Arts (1982)— the classical, expressive, oracular, and… Read More ›
Bloomsbury Group
Desmond MacCarthy’s claim that there “is little in common between the work of Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster” (Memories 172) is a useful starting… Read More ›
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