Victorian Poetry and Robert Browning, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Victorian Poetry and Robert Browning e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VICTORIAN POETRY  During Victorian Age, poetry became concerned with social reality and this led to: 1. The creation of a monumental poetry linked to belief in greatness of England. 2. Poetry of disbelief that had to solve ethical problems linked to science and progress.  The poet is seen as a prophet and a philosopher who had to reconcile faith and progress to fill materialism with romance.  Optimists  believed progress could be reached without altering traditional organisation.  Major poets: - Tennyson - Browning – creator of dramatic monologues  Pre-Raphaelites  group of young poets and painters that tried to react against a society which destroyed the beauty of nature. The saw poetry and material as opposites without an halfway. Linked to Aestheticism and Art for art’s sake. DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE  = narrative poem with a speaker (a character different from the poet) and a silent listener (reader).  The speaker is supposing to have someone who’s listening.  The speaker uses an augmentative tone without completing the scenes leaving this task to the reader’s imagination.  In medias res – the poem reveals immediately the crucial moment.  Different point of views. Absence of a unique truth.  Interest in human psychology. ROBERT BROWNING (1812-89)  During his period, prose was the main form of literature but he wanted to make poetry compete with prose.  Different approach from the other poets of his age, in particular Tennyson.  Use of ordinary speech.  He was not interested in social problem because he preferred intellectual strength.  He did not want to deal with society and himself so he took refuge in earlier periods (Renaissance).  He hides behind a mask (of a character) so we cannot know his exact judgment.  Browning preferred historical figures rather than myth (different from Tennyson)  He used dramatic monologue.  Characters  always at a critical stage of their lives. Vivid and fascinating with a bit of folly.  He waved between poetry and drama. He started with musical poetry but after many critics, he turned to a more detached type of poetry hiding himself behind a mask. He tried drama but it was unsuccessful.  The theatre’s experience introduced him to dialogues and was helpful to find a halfway between drama and poetry: dramatic monologue.  Themes: - Sin and corruption - Love  lower than passion - Religion and time. - Cruelty and passions  The reader is curios to understand what the words want to reveal and has the possibility to make his own judgment.  Language and syntax – more colloquial and less harmonious tradition (like Donne’s poetry). Tendency to choose words not for their musicality but for the intellectual value able to explore human’s mind complexity.  The complexity influenced writers of 20th century like Joyce and Ezra Pound. PORPHYRIA’S LOVER (Dramatic lyrics) “Porphyria’s Lover,” which appeared in 1842, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. Summary The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside and his lover is a beautiful young woman named Porphyria. The unnamed speaker of the poem sits in his house on a stormy night when Porphyria arrives out of the rain, starts a fire in the fireplace, and takes off her dripping coat and gloves. She hugs the speaker and pulls his head down to rest against her shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her and probably he is pretending to sleep. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she loves him and how she has for a moment overcome societal strictures to be with him but he criticizes her for being too weak to break all her ties (=legami). He realizes that she loves him at this instant. Realizing that this will not be forever, he wants to preserve the moment so he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. Then he opens her eyes, unwraps the hair from her neck, and spends the rest of the night cuddling with her corpse. The speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him. Commentary  “Porphyria’s Lover,” has a natural and rural language. “Yellow hair” instead of blonde hair.  Like most of Browning’s other dramatic monologues, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.  Porphyria is probably richer than the speaker, and so those "ties" are referred to her rich family. Or maybe she has a rich fiancé who she's reluctant to break up with for the speaker. Or maybe she's been hesitating about whether or not to sleep with the speaker, and she's too "vain" to go against Victorian social and sexual codes to have sex before marriage.  In any case, the speaker seems unimpressed when she tells him that she loves him. After all, she hasn't been willing to break, or "dissever," whatever those "vainer ties" are.  The scene is now not just sexual, but also transgressive. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society.  Many believed that the amorality could be forgot only with an even greater shock. In light of contemporary scandals (sexual scandals and prostitutes were not unusual), the sexual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader’s probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience.