Part
2:
Karl Marx brought the concept of
socialism to London in 1870, and Germany was a threat in the political sector. It was a
time of rapid changes in social and economic sectors that had no parallel in earlier
history.
"The
pace and depth of such developments, while they fostered a mood of nationalist pride and
optimism about future progress, also produced social stress, turbulence, and widespread
anxiety about the ability of the nation and the individual to cope, socially,
politically, and psychologically, with the cumulative problems of the age.” -
A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H.
Abrams.
Because of the
invention of steam and steel, industrial revolution occurred, which led to the growth of
urbanization, production of great wealth for the expanding middle class, massive
poverty, and deterioration of rural England. Besides, a huge conflict occurred
especially because of Darwin's evolution theory between science and religion. Darwin
suggested that humans are actually originated from the apes. This struck the Orthodox,
and moved the faith of people in religion. Besides, the industrial revolution caused
rapid growth of factories, mills, industries, and people began to yield to mammon while
capitalism enveloped spirituality. Human race became calculating and materialistic.
Science brought new inventions and these inventions, while doing well to humans, was
making them more mechanized. They were more interested in business than religion, were
busy in working and making money.
This chaotic state
especially the conflict between science and religion is wonderfully depicted in the
poems of those poets who were extremely worried because of the conflict; Matthew Arnold
is one of those. Poets like Arnold of nineteenth century started to hold a very
pessimistic view about the Victorian crisis, and in almost all his poems including
Dover Beach, The Scholar
Gypsy, he seems to express only a negative attitude toward his
contemporary age. But we see a quite dissimilar attitude in the poems of his most
renowned contemporary, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Unlike Arnold, he expressed a compromising
attitude to his age and its intricate problems. Tennyson, we find, in his
Ulysses, The Lotos Eaters,
The Charge of the Light Brigade, holds such a sort of view
which is supposed to find a middle ground. He is neither too melancholic like Arnold nor
too optimistic like Robert Browning, another contemporary, in terms of the tone, mood
and theme of his poetry. He tries to portray in his poems a real and clear picture of
the problems of contemporary age in an implicit way, and then shows positivity or a ray
of hope at the end of almost all his poems. In fact the poem 'The Charge of the Light
Brigade', which is based upon the Crimean War, describes the marvelous courage of the
British soldiers and pays homage to them.
More or less, one
thing is common among almost all the poets of the Victorian era (1837-1901); they have
dealt with the Victorian crisis.
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