Remodeling Models: The Recursive Element in Victorian Poetry and Poetics

Abstract

Explores reasons Victorian poets turned to the past for subjects, and how their preoccupation with the past informed poetic theory in the nineteenth century. Distinguishes Arnold’s understanding of the past from his Romantic predecessors. Demonstrates how Victorian poets used the past as a means of establishing differences while acknowledging similarities with their literary and historical predecessors, because the past societies seem to have held certain truths about reality that the Victorians no longer found tenable. Uses works by Tennyson and Arnold to explain the Victorians’ use of recursive techniques.