Victorian Poetry

We may know an era by its poetry - or at least those eras for which poetry was still important. It might be difficult indeed to draw any conclusions about our own days from poetry because it has become so marginal to the lives and experiences of most 21st-century denizens. But for the Victorians, who still read poetry as if it had ability to change the world, poetry was a vibrant expression of the era's values - and its fears. We can see, for example, the era's intense occupation with status and social hierarchy in Robert Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church," a poem that demonstrates how this obsession with people's position in the world merged into an obsession with death and the dead, with death as a force that erased the status that people strove so hard to create and uphold in life....
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