The Tensions between the Conflicting Demands of the Victorian against the Modern in the poems of Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins

Abstract

The tensions between the Victorian and modern poetry produced by scientific and intellectual achievements, industrialism and technological achievements. A great deal of Victorian intellectual effort was spent in trying to hold together a universe which was exploding. It was an 
age of conflicting expiations and theories of scientific and economic confidence and of social and spiritual pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of which the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present. In terms of pattern and spirit, Victorian poetry 
shares in common with Romantic tendencies. The most striking fact to mention here by the end of the nineteenth century, a transition took place in terms of the reaction shown towards middle class values. An anti-Victorian aestheticism grasped the general intelligentsia to make a gesture 
of independence from and resistance to the pressures and tensions of the time. The threat of unbelief is experienced by the people and it appeared that a literary faith was gradually replacing the dogmatic faith. Against the solidarity of the external world, the inner world appeared to be 
non-existent. The main aim of this paper is to explore or to discuss the conflicting demands and the tension between Victorian against the Modern in the poems of Tennyson Browning and Hopkins