‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Men and Women’ are poems without unity. Discuss.

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‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Men and Women’ are poems without unity. Discuss.

“The present generation which has grown up in an open spiritual ocean…will never know what it was like to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars.’ J.A. Froude

The profound atmosphere and reality of change during the Victorian period both prompted, and allowed the public emergence of, an unprecedented diversity of opinion and belief, which in turn could not but influence the poets and other artists of the day, whether they were simply reacting to the spirit of the age or adding their own views to the public debate. The growing democratisation of the respectable intellectual arena previously dominated by a mostly homogenous aristocratic elite and the continuing effects of the Industrial Revolution and rapid scientific development led to contemporary poets exhibiting a similar diversity within their work. Unable to present a ‘uniform perspective of contemporary life’ within their work they instead created a variety of different ‘realms of verse’, each with its own agenda with regard to the reader and its own methods of signification. This lack of coherence is evident in the poetry of both Tennyson and Browning at this time, signifying perhaps the universal sense of uncertainty, whether in response to general religious doubts or the destabilising effect of a more personal grief.

        The most obvious point to be made is that neither of the collection of  poems themselves superficially appear to make up a coherent whole. The one hundred and thirty three different sections of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ were written separately, certainly initially without the idea of a long elegy in mind, but it is unclear at which point he began to write specifically for the piece ‘I did not write them with any view of weaving them into a whole, or for publication, until I found that I had written so many.’. One of the titles considered for the finished work was ‘Fragments of an Elegy’, which would seem more fitting to the many different issues contained within the poem, which has been described by critics as being unified only by its metre and form. It is less one poem than a series linked by the same technical rules, and this fits in with the poet’s opinions on the superiority of a small, perfectly formed poem to a larger and necessarily more ungainly work, as he explained to his son; ‘a small boat built on good lines will float farther down the stream of time than a big raft’, although it could be argued that if this was the case then the poems would perhaps have been better published separately, grouped together as they are in what is nominally one long poem.

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        As a collection ‘Men and Women’ is also notably without a definite structural unity, and Browning’s complete rearrangement of the poems within it for a later collection of his work indicates that initially he did not see the pieces as grouped together by anything more than the date that they were written. Eight poems from the original volume were included, together with some from other publications, in the new ‘Men and Women’ and the rest appeared under the more prosaic titles of ‘Dramatic Lyrics’ and ‘Dramatic Romances’.  By this time Browning obviously saw these chosen poems as belonging to a ...

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