The Forgotten Victorian Modernists

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how modernist poetry did not explode from reactions to the First World War by analyzing the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. It shows how modernism, in fact, has its roots in Victorian poetry, though we do not generally give the Victorian poets any credit for it. It attempts to demonstrate this by studying not only the poets, but also the scientists, philosophers and psychologists of the times.

From the Paper:

"Traditional and moral values suddenly lost their meaning, and everything that once was "true" was put into question. This loss created feelings of despair that led to "the social dislocations and personal longing for absolutes that constituted the intellectual climate in which Modernism [was] born and developed." The modernist movement in poetry is, of course, not an immediate result of these new feelings, and many poets of the time continued to follow traditional forms of writing, but there are a number of poets who reacted rather dramatically to the anxiety of the time. These poets, Alfred lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold in particular, exemplified the sense of loss felt by all those living in the Victorian Age and anticipated the modernist poets."

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