Romantic & Victorian Era Poetry

Starting in the later eighteenth century, and with gathering force into and through the nineteenth century, poets and other writers addressed themselves to a new and unprecedented problem: that of the human spirit which must steer itself, unaided by any automatic or implicit faith, through "the dark night of the soul" of spiritual crisis.

This was a challenge which had not arisen before, at least not in the sense that the poets of the Romantic and Victorian eras faced it. In the age of faith, which in literary terms carries us through Milton, the immanence of God, as supporter and judge alike of the soul in its confrontation with personal crisis, was in general neither challenged nor affirmed, but simply assumed. But if the Restoration of 1660 restored a king, it dethroned the immanent God, exiling him from immediate presence to the remote status of Great Clockmaker, removed in time and space beyond the furthest edge of the Newtonian universe--and in that universe, which knew no Big Bang and no law of entropy, this edge was itself infinitely removed from the sphere of human awareness.

The Augustan Age appears not to have missed the older God; in exiling him it also, for a time, exiled the very concept of spiritual crisis. Its literary imagination was more interested in the Newtonian universe itself, its richness and ordered complexity. Its poetry may delight us with its balance and precision, but it does not cry out in the vastness of the night, and it seldom moves

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be read, there has been a widespread feeling in the present century that Scott is not really worth the serious attention of adults ... Once regarded as at least an un- exceptionable author for the schoolroom, he has come to be thought of by many as a downright bore and the positive enemy of a lively enjoyment of literature in the young. (Mayhead, 1-2) In fact, we may wonder whether "the schoolroom" is a place where many young people actually learn lively enjoyment of literature. It is not necessary, in any case, for an author to be read for him to continue to influence popular tastes. The film version of Ivanhoe is as frequently shown on television as "Robin Hood," and it is probably more the movie than the book on which it is based that has carried Ivanhoe into the popular imagination of the present. But, whether or not he is read in the schoolroom, it seems that Scott does in fact continue to be read. As a very simple operational test of Ivanhoe's popular readibility, the copy that this writer checked out of a public library showed that it had been checked out twice in each of the previous two months. This is an impressive volume of circulation for a book written five generations ago, in a vanished sty

Category: Literature - R