Tennyson's "Ulysses" as a Poem of Quest

Ulysses is widely considered to be a poem of quest, a theme representative of the overarching Victorian spirit of enterprise. The goal of Ulysses’ quest is knowledge – Ulysses, having caught a glimpse of “an untraveled world” feels compelled to pursue it even if it were to elude him forever. While Ulysses believes that even senility and death are no obstacles, he is conscious of the deadline, so to speak, that death, ever-looming, imposes on him. Ulysses underlines the extraordinary character of the poem’s protagonist – who, even in the face of pain and death, is determined to come out a hero.

Another interpretation of Ulysses could be that it is a poem about conquest – giving voice to the thirst for power in the age of unfettered imperialism. The protagonist, in some ways, appears to embody the spirit of the Victoria age with his yearning for knowledge and his desire to explore the ends of the earth. Considering how the age of European imperialism transpired, the last line of the poem - about striving, seeking, finding, and never yielding - might as well have been the rallying battle cry of imperialists. 

Salient Features of Victorian Poetry

The Victorian era of the United Kingdom lasted from 1837, when Queen Victoria was crowned monarch, until her death in 1901. The Victorian age was marked by extraordinarily rapid changes, of heady confidence in the inexorable march towards progress.

Perhaps, the most important change that transformed Britain from an agrarian economy (based on land ownership) to a modern urban economy (based on manufacturing and enterprise) was the industrial revolution. The nature of such a change hardly lent itself to poetic inspiration, and that is obvious from the works turned out during the period. Albeit, it is noteworthy that the Victorian age saw the rise of prose, especially novels – novels were, without doubt, the most creative output of the age.

Every age in literature attempts to define its own identity by revolting against the values and practices of its predecessors. This was true of the Victoria age too – who reacted against what they felt was the soppy, flighty, and saccharine sweet poetry of late Romanticism. Victorian era poets, such as Robert Browning and Tennyson, developed a more purposeful poetry that focused on narrative and concrete, everyday issues in the real world. The overarching character of Victorian-era poetry was a preference for the intellectual over the emotional. Poetry was turned into a forum for discussing the socio-cultural conflicts that preoccupied the leading minds of the time. In this manner, Victorian poets reacted against what they perceived to be excessive emotionalism of the Romantics and turned poetry into a rational, intellectual criticism of contemporary society. The works of the poets of the age displayed a strong concern for the problems of the age – the streak of social awareness that characterized the writings of the age confirmed the transformation of the poet into social activist. Some of the leading social activist-poets of the time were Lord Alfred Tennyson, Mathew Arnold, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In addition to social concern, the other salient feature of Victorian poetry was religion. The Victorian age witnessed new discoveries and inventions of science that transformed the common man’s conceptions of the meaning and nature of world and life. Darwin’s theory of evolution brought Biblical myths under inspection and the consequent conflict between rationalism and faith become a defining characteristic of Victorian life. With the threat of potential religious annihilation looming large, religious poetry became an important aid to spread faith and reassert the importance of the divine. Victorian poets such as John Keble insisted that poetry could induce Christians to deeper acts of devotion. Famous hymns, such as Lead Kindly Light by John Henry Newman, were authored during the period. It is significant that despite the strong currents of skepticism that swept across Victorian society, religious concerns continued to hold sway over many minds.

The Role of Childhood Memories in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"

The focus of Tintern Abbey is memory, specifically memories from William Wordsworth’s childhood of communing with nature. Tintern Abbey is William Wordsworth’s first great ode to his primary motto, which is that memories of communing with unspoilt mother nature in childhood works on the mind even into adulthood, when access to those pure memories are thought to be lost. The poet employs a device that he once described as two consciousnesses – he conjures up a “picture in the mind”, from memory, of a place that he has visited before, which he then juxtaposes with the visual of the same place in front of him in the present day. He recollects the memory of his past experiences from the area, and superimposes them over his present view of them. When the two visuals fail to match, the poet is, at once, sad and perplexed.

The poet acknowledges that he is a different person today, when compared to how carefree he was those many years ago, when he bounded over the hills and waded through the streams. He is now acutely aware of everything that the present scene offers him – all his senses are heightened.

The poet believes that the past is firmly behind him and he has no need to mourn it. Life has compensated him with a new set of gifts centered on the theme of maturity. On the whole, he is happy knowing that his present experience will, in turn, provide many happy memories for the years to come.

Romantic Poets, Creative Imagination, and the Transformation of the Individual and Society

Romantic stalwarts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth believed that imagination should be regarded as a superior human faculty, the transubstantiator of experience. The towering Percy Bysshe Shelley felt that without moral imagination, man - in an acquisitive society – “having enslaved the elements, remains a slave himself”. Equally important to Shelley was sympathetic imagination, the faculty by which an individual overleaps the limits of his own neural, emotional, and ideological absorptions, and identifies himself with the thoughts and feelings of other men. Shelley avers that the faculty in poetry, which allows us to share the joys and sorrows of imagined characters, is also the basis for all morality, because it compels us to feel for others what we feel for ourselves, to do unto others what we do to ourselves. 

John Keats, the main figure in the second generation of Romantic poets, was certain that he was certain of nothing, “but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination…” He was convinced that what the imagination saw as beauty must be truth and laid great stress on negative capability (or selfless receptivity) – that great poetic capacity wherefore man effaces his own personal identity by immersing it sympathetically and spontaneously with the given subject. 

Romantic poets considered the imagination in poetry, especially nature poetry, as a catalyst for individual meditative reflection – to tool to assist them in tackling and resolving personal crises. Some Romantic poets used the lyric form of poetry to channel their personal feelings. They were able to achieve a sense of kinetic grandeur and infinity, and sometimes even irrationality and fear, through the power of imagination.

Frederich von Schiler - German poet, dramatist, philosopher, and historian extraordinaire – was convinced that imagination, through the use of symbols, enables the reconciliation and transcendence of reality through a heightened state of consciousness. In a distant echo of Keats, Schiller believed that what a person’s imagination saw as beauty could ennoble his nature. Imagination, according to Schiller, harmonized duty and inclination through art, and could make every one of us a beautiful soul (schöne Seele). 

For the Romantics, imagination (as poetry) – through its colour, contour, and character – could humanize a faceless world. It could, at once, provide both an impetus to action as well as a means to escape the harshness that is sometimes reality.

The Classical and Romantic Periods of Western Literature

The terms ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ refer to periods in Western literature and other art forms.

The Classical period was named thus retroactively by Renaissance-era scholars with reference to the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans of antiquity. Thinkers of the Renaissance, literally meaning ‘rebirth’ in French, considered themselves as the heirs of the Classical heritage, even if that inheritance were interrupted by the Middle Ages (sometimes branded as the Dark Ages). What set the Classical period apart was its stringent, rigid focus on traditional forms and structures, on unity, wholeness, and rational design. In literature, this meant a preference for urban settings in prose and poetic storylines; attention to detail in metre, rhyme, and stanza; and an unrelenting focus on formal execution.

For example, the over 14000 lines of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia are written in a disciplined rhyming pattern known as terza rima.

The Romantic period witnessed an artistic movement that celebrated all strong emotions, including that of love (which most people immediately assume is what the word ‘romantic’ refers to). Writers from the Romantic period searched for beauty and truth in all aspects of life – imagination and emotion, not reason, were considered the beacons of truth and raison’d etre of art.

Romantic thinkers placed more importance on the understanding and expression of strong emotion rather than technical perfection, which was an obsession with Classicists. In some ways, the Romantic period was a reaction, a sort of backlash to the rigidity of the Classical period. We find evidence of this Romantic overthrow of Classical preoccupations in the displacement of urban settings, so preferred by Classical and Neoclassical writers, by rural landscapes and backdrops.

Thus, we find an example in William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, a poem about an eponymous monastery in the rural, southern Welsh country of Monmouthshire. The poem was composed in blank verse - unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter; lines that do not exactly conform to the stress patterns of the metre. Loosely-metred writings such as this would have been anathema to Classical writers, but were passionately embraced by Romanticists. 

The Use of Allegory in Swift's "Gulliver's Travels"

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a satirical masterpiece from cover to cover and is rife with allegorical meaning. The novel satirizes almost every aspect of human life – government, knowledge, human relationships, morals, technology, and even excrement! One could even take the view that the novel, in its entirety, is an allegory of the collapse of human values, and the various seemingly-exotic peoples that he encounters are actually allegories of various aspects of the human race.”

In the section describing Gulliver’s sojourn in Lilliput, Swift ridicules the empty rituals and meaningless courtesy of the court there. For example, the status of Liliputian ministers depends on how high they can jump over a rope – a totally irrelevant qualification for a government official! This is a not-so-subtle allegorical reference to the ostentatious formality among the British upper class and nobility and their obsession with etiquette, manners, rules, and regulations.

Swift also satirizes human obsession with appearance and its inability to look beyond it. Within this satire lies a deep allegorical lesson – that size has little to do with power. For example, even though Gulliver was a veritable giant among the Lilliputians, he was still petty in rank and status. On the other hand, even though he was no more than a cockroach, in terms of size, in Brobdingnag, one of its inhabitants, Glumdalclitch, actually takes care of him. Even the queen of Brobdingnag is kind toward him, even if she sees him as a source of entertainment.

In various parts of the book, Swift mocks humans for their obsession with power, and suggests that all human relations are based, not on virtue, but on power – on who exercises power, who is controlled by power, and who understand the dynamics and politics of power. Thus, we have the following account from Gulliver while he was in Lilliput:

Providence never intended to make the Management of publick Affairs a Mystery, to be comprehended only by a few Persons of sublime genius, of which there seldom are three born in an Age.

In this extract, Swift is actually lampooning the institution of Parliament that the English were so proud of, which, they felt set them apart from the barbaric and uncivilized natives. In reality, Swift charges that the whole parliamentary process is shrouded in unnecessary mystery and when the common man seeks to understand it, he is often dismissed for his supposed lack of training in the process! The only people who seem to perpetually benefit from such an arrangement are the people in power and the people who understand power – usually the rich and the powerful. Gulliver goes so far as to describe the English parliament as “a knot of pedlars, pickpockets, highwaymen and bullies”!

In the concluding section, Gulliver hesitates to inform the King of his discovery of new realms because he fears the scourge of colonization that might follow. Consider the following quote from Gulliver:

…they see an harmless people, are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home and get their pardon…

This is a devastating allegorical indictment of the history of European colonialism. In my opinion, a better and as-succinct-a summary of this shameful chapter in history is yet to be written.

During his stay at Brobdingnag, when Gulliver teaches the king the use of gunpowder, the king is flabbergasted at its destructive potential and at the people who invented it. The king declares that humans are “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Brutal words, these, but a fair assessment of a people that seemed to take pride in their ability to engage in mass destruction.

Swift, writing during the period of Enlightenment, when Reason reigned supreme in all the land, does not hold back from satirizing even knowledge and mankind’s pride in his ability to pontificate and philosophize. This, he does through the descriptions of the lives of the inhabitants of Laputa, Lagado, and Balnibari – In Laputa, for example, the inhabitants are brilliant mathematicians; however, in their obsession to calculate when the sun will burn out and so on, they have ignored practical, everyday considerations such as building straight walls and square corners! Swift goes on in a similar vein about Lagado and Balnibari as well.

As a final piece of evidence of how Gulliver’s Travels works as an allegory, I’d like to discuss what some people call Swift’s “scatological vision.” Swift spends a lot of time describing bodily functions and how their produce might be processed after expulsion! Consider, for example, how the scientists in Lagado attempt to make food from excrement. In my opinion, this is just Swift’s allegorical way of telling us how ugly, in reality, the human body is and how sickening its functions are, no matter how we may have willed ourselves into believing otherwise.

In this manner, Swift, through scathing satire, provides insightful allegories to understand not just specific English customs and manners, but also the general human condition.

"Joseph Andrews" and the Satirization of English Society

The satire in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews is an acerbic commentary on 18th century English social life, manners, and etiquette, especially the pretensions of the people of the time to morality and virtue.

In the book, we find that behind the veneer of reserved virtue that English women of good society were expected to exhibit, they were constantly in pursuit of amorous excitement. We find multiple women from various strata of English society, Lady Booby, Mrs. Slipslop, and Betty, who brazenly attempt to seduce, in vain, the handsome eponymous protagonist.

Yet, with Fielding, there are no cardboard characters and the picture is never one-sided, unlike the characters in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. (Incidentally, Fielding depicts Andrews to be the brother of Pamela, from Richardson’s novel!) Every virtuous character is shown to have vices in them, and vice versa.

Parson Adams, a man of the cloth, viewed favorably by all, is also shown to be a vain man – consumed with vanity about his profession, his knowledge, and his teaching abilities. He is also depicted as an extremely selfish and materialistic man. Au contraire, while Betty is generally considered promiscuous, she is also compassionate and generous. Then, we have the humble postilion who takes pity on Andrews’ miserable plight and gladly gives him his coat, even when of the postilion’s well-bred passengers previously refused the request to admit the nearly-frozen, beaten, and robbed Andrews into the coach. Here, Fielding shows that a charitable spirit is not the exclusive preserve of those who have plenty; in fact, the poor, may, sometimes, be more giving than the rich. However, we later find that the same do-gooder postilion is convicted of stealing.

Fielding brutally depicts society’s insincerity through his representation of the judges, who are as dishonest as the parson and the squire. The squire, in fact, attempts to abuse his position by raping Fanny, Andrews’ love interest. Justice Frolick is shown as going out of his way to throw Joseph and Fanny behind bars, only to satisfy Lady Booby’s whim.

In summary, Fielding’s novel paints an expansive picture of 18th century English society, and it directs its satirical diatribe not against convenient straw men that the author wants to vilify, but against the foibles, follies, and vices of an entire society.