![]() ![]() Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) echoing the deracinated and sterile worlds of, for instance, James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874). ![]() Rather, this argument runs, Modernism-allowing it for clarity to be a single entity for a moment-drew on and re-interpreted elements of nineteenth-century practice in verse and prose, to say nothing of wider cultural and political matters, whether that be, in literary terms, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) magnifying the realist principles of Victorian fiction or, say, T. 1 The recent one is that, contrary to the statements of both Modernists themselves and a corpus of critical opinion thereafter, Modernism was not simply a rejection of, or reaction against, the ‘Victorian’ (the scare quotation marks I will henceforth take for granted). There are, to speak in enormous generalizations, two now familiar stories about the relationship between the ‘Victorians’ and Modernism. The conclusion suggests that, while the most familiar argument is that the Modernists were turning against the ‘traditional’ poetry of the Victorians, the case of the reception of Alfred Austin hints at a way in which some Modernists were, without realizing it, heeding the essential advice of the last of the Victorian critics and responding to their hopes. The essay considers what negative models of a poet the 1890s developed, and examines critics’ doubts about poetry that made direct and apparently personally sincere statements on politics in the public domain. ![]() Concentrating on the newspapers, periodicals, and journals of this decade, my essay discusses critics’ sense that British poetry had lost its way and their implicit aspiration for new directions. This essay is not an argument for that work’s merits, but it does claim that we miss an important local episode of literary history, involving valuable questions about literary periodization, in the years before the establishment of Modernist poetics, if we overlook not Austin but the debates in the 1890s concerning him. The work of the final Poet Laureate of the Victorian period, Alfred Austin (1835–1913), has not survived among readers of poetry or drama. ![]()
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