On a Darkling Plain
Victorian Poetry and Thought
by
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The pessimism that crept into the consciousness of the poets wore many faces. Tennyson was pessimistic because he believed little of real value had been accomplished in the course of sixty years. Arnold was pessimistic because he was convinced that he lived in iron times squarely between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born. Housman, mixing a dark fatalism with a playful attitude, lamented the brevity of life, capricious chance, and the untimely death of young lovers in their prime. Hardy’s bleak pessimism emerged from a deep conviction that hap or chance or blind fate rule the universe. Men and women in Hardy’s view live in the midst of violent forces they can neither understand nor control. The petty insect man that crawls across earth’s face suffers and dies and nothing more. When Hardy was in his prime, the novel and other art forms were also showing the influence of a darkly pessimistic world view. And yet in spite of this pessimistic bent, it would be hard to find among the poets of our day even a semblance of the eagerness and energy of the Victorian poets. If they had neglected to address those important issues that flustered their contemporaries, they would have felt an abrogation of duty, and they would have seen themselves as dismal failures. Even as they applied their vast energy to the problems of their time, they managed to examine the mysteries of life and death and immortality, the traditional subjects of poetry. If the Victorians were not more gifted than the lyrical Romantic poets who influenced them, they were courageous and sincere. They believed to a person that life and the incessant struggle to improve life are worth the effort, and they believed in work.
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About the Book
Speaking the deepest and truest thoughts of humankind in the language available only to the gifted, the Victorian poets elected to do more than merely sing as versifiers. By coming to grips with thorny contemporary issues and suggesting workable solutions, they struggled to lead their people out of the wilderness. Tennyson, who came to be known as the voice of Victorianism, is the poet most often credited with this ambition. But Matthew Arnold and the other major poets had a similar aim. Their poems, while not devoid of feeling, are charged with the main currents of social, scientific, religious, and philosophical thought. Interwoven and resonating in sensuous song is their own thought. The best of the poetry fits the word and thought to the troubling developments of the time and rises to a prophecy to predict the problems of our time.
About the Author
James Haydock was born in South Carolina, grew up in North Carolina, and lived later in many parts of the USA. After college he served four years in the Air Force, receiving his master’s degree from Baylor University while still on active duty. Later he lived and worked in Denver and Los Angeles and attended the graduate school of UCLA before taking a job as a technical writer in a local aircraft company. Leaving that job, he returned to the University of North Carolina where he had received his bachelor’s degree, and there earned a Ph.D. in Victorian Studies. Afterwards, for nearly thirty years, he wrote and published and taught as professor of English in the University of Wisconsin. After retirement he published Portraits in Charcoal: George Gissing's Women (a biographical study), Stormbirds (a novel), and Victorian Sages (on the prose of the period). His current book, On a Darkling Plain, is a meticulous study of Victorian poetry and thought.