page_title: Victorian literature
section_title: Poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Victorian literature / Poetry
caption_attribution_description: Alfred Tennyson
context_page_description: Victorian literature is literature, mainly written in English, during the reign of Queen Victoria. It was preceded by Romanticism and followed by the Edwardian era.
  While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had tended to dominate, the novel became the defining literary art form of the Victorian period. Charles Dickens dominated the first part of Victoria's reign and most rightly can be called "The King of Victorian Literature". His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864–65. William Thackeray's most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's Middlemarch, while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy, whose first published novel, Desperate Remedies, appeared in 1871 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895.
context_section_description: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted their love affair through verse and produced many tender and passionate poems.  Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry and the Georgian Poetry of the early 20th century. However Hopkins's poetry was not published until 1918. Arnold's works anticipate some of the themes of these later poets, while Hopkins drew inspiration from verse forms of Old English poetry such as Beowulf.
  The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but also the medieval literature of England.  The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behaviour and impress it upon the people both at home and in the wider empire.  The best example of this is Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which blended the stories of King Arthur, particularly those by Thomas Malory, with contemporary concerns and ideas.  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood also drew on myth and folklore for their art, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti contemporaneously regarded as the chief poet amongst them, although his sister Christina is now held by scholars to be a stronger poet.
caption: Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate
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