Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 14 - The Poetry of Married Life

  • Edited by Gail Marshall, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1850s
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025, pp 317-337

  • Summary

    ‘The Poetry of Married Life’ reflects on poetic descriptions of the quotidian reality of married life in the light of idealistic notions of ‘companionate marriage’ emerging from contemporary Socialist and Utopian thought and the prevalent sense of what Matthew Arnold called the ‘poetrylessness’ of modern life. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House begins by attempting to dignify the mundane events of married life, but finds, like the other poets whose work is examined in this chapter, that ‘[the] poetry of married life is almost invariably a poetry of postponement and evasion’. The result, in the work of Patmore and others, is a poetry which combines a typically Victorian focus on what Robert Browning calls the ‘moment, one and infinite’ in which the meaning and value of life are revealed with an equally characteristic search for forms capable of embodying the poets’ continual reflection on and reassessment of experience.