Mythology and Romanticism: The Minor Poets

When I began to read again, back in 2002, after nearly thirty years of not reading, one of the first books I read was Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, c. 1990.  I picked it up at a discount bookstore, knowing very little about the author and almost nothing about the subject or her thesis. If I understand her correctly in that book, she looks at the push and pull of paganism vs Christianity, and argues, if I remember correctly and interpret correctly, that Christianity never defeated paganism and in fact, paganism, in literature and culture, surrounds us.

My background was in science and I did not read literature, except as required for my liberal arts degree. I was never aware there was a conflict being played out between the two, Christianity and paganism, in literature and the fine arts, in general.

Now it seems, I am immersed in that discussion in all that I read. I saw it again in The Wooden Horse (Keld Zeruneith, c. 2007) and now again in Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Douglas Bush, c. 1937).

These are some of my personal notes from one of the later chapters in Bush's book.

"The Minor Poets, Mid-Victorian and Later"

As a reminder

• Renaissance: 14th to 17th century
• Industrial Revolution: 1760 - 1830
• Romantic Era: 2nd half of 18th century
• Victorian Era: 1837 - 1901

According to Bush,

Some minor poets accepted the Victorian compromise between religion and science, some followed the Pre-Raphaelites in ignoring both....

... Evolution provided a basis for the Christian meliorism of Roden Noel as well as for the pagan meliorism of George Meredith; it also contributed to the stark pessimism of James Thomson.  What especially concerns us, the mythological conception of nature, had apparently died with WOrdsworth, Keats and Shelley...
... Major as well as minor Victorian poets generally lacked the large and positive humanitarian faith of the romantics, and at the same time they recoiled from the blatant commercial optimism of an age of prosperity and progress. For Keats and Shelley classic myths had been symbols with which to body forth a vision of man and a new world; now they became a means of withdrawal from the world.

Philosophy

• Meliorism: right for humans to alter conditions of life in an attempt to improve things
  
• Apologism: wrong for humans to alter conditions of life in an attempt to improve things

Bush breaks the minor poets during the mid-Victorian era and later into three groups.

First group: in one way or another have a central relation to the conflict between Christianity and paganism

• James Thomson (1834 - 1882)

Anti-ascetic; advocated a full, bold and natural enjoyment of life, but in the vein of Blake rather than of Victorian neo-pagans.

Concludes that, "as Christianity has killed the pagan mythology, so modern science has killed the Christian." (Wow, this is exactly what Camille Paglia was writing about, but she argues that Christianity did not succeed in killing paganism. It appears, at least to me, that science has killed both.)

• Roden Noel (1834 - 1894)

One of the "Prophet-Poets" (along with Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge) who spoke of "Universal Life." But according to Bush, Noel differs from most of his spiritual ancestors in at least two major articles; his passionate gospe of nature is bound up with a passionate Christianity, and he has a post-Darwinian consciousness of the cruelty of nature.

By the way, a recent book, The Selfless Gene (Charles Foster, c. 2010) has the "cruelty of nature" as one of his major themes.

• Katherine Bradley (1846 - 1914)
• Edith Cooper (1862 - 1913)

Bush says these two are related to the theme of paganism and Christianity because, outwardly if not really, they began on one side and ended on the other. 

Cooper was niece and ward of Bradley; they wrote around 40 works together under the pen name of Michael Field, including 27 tragedies, a masque and 8 volumes of lyrics. Their "cover" was blown when they confided in their close friend Robert Browning.

Over time they evolved, becoming Roman Catholics in 1907. In the preceding thirty years they had been, as the elder said of herself in 1889, "Christian, pagan, pantheist, and other things in the name of which I do not know."

Second group: though the theme of conflict is not absent, these poets represented art for art's sake

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882), swarthy Bohemian

Combined the purest doctrine of art for art's sake with the mercenary hardness of the Philistine dealer, whose mystical conception of love rose, to borrow Donne's phrase, like a lily out of red earth, who was, rather than the English and noisily self-conscious Swinburne, the real high-priest of Victorian neo-paganism, undeniably had an untidy greatness about him. That, however, does not prevent our finding it almost as difficult nowadays to read much of his poetry as art critics do to look at his paintings. His work in both kinds seems to belong too much to "literature," and, while we feel the power of great lines, in the end we are stifled and thirsty for reality.

• Richard Watson Dixon (1833 - 1900), very English and respectable; an unappreciated clergyman

His Oxford friends were Morris and Burne-Jones: abandoned holy for artistic orders
Morris became a "pagan" mythological poet
Hopkins: condemned mythology and almost renounced poetry
But, Dixon as an Anglican cleric had no trouble in reconciling Christ and Apollo
His poetry reflects Pre-Raphaelite modes

• Others with Pre-Raphaelit affiliations

Thomas Gordon Hake
Eugene Lee-Hamilton

• Others, linked by their French verse forms as wells as interest in classical themes

Austin Dobson
Sir Edmund Gosse
Andrew Lang

• Oscar Wilde 

Wilde is given undeserved space at the end of this section because his verse shows all the traditional elements of romantic Hellenism in all the refinement and purity of decadence, freed at last from any vulgar contact with life. He wrote of beauty, love and pain, religion, the religion of humanity, liberty, nature, pantheism and the cosmic soul, and of course mythology, and Shelley to Arnold and Swinburne.
In exploiting the conventions of his elder contemporaries Wilde showed his lack of originality and his genius for immediate success

Third group: two men who cannot be grouped with either of two first groups

• Lord De Tabley, born John Byrne Leicester Warren (1835 - 1895): good and unpopular

• Sir Lewis Morris: bad and popular