Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

One poem, that has received a great deal of critical attention recently, is Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. This poem has not been rediscovered for its qualities as an item of ‘narrative verse’. It has instead come to notice because of the recent emergence of new kinds of feminist knowledge alerting contemporary readers to late Victorian social issues surrounding femininity: prostitution; anorexia nervosa; lesbianism and sisterly love; the role of the single woman; and ideologies of motherhood and childcare.

Attention to syntactic and linguistic features plays a major part in the grouping of texts into generic formations. Yet it must not be forgotten that different genres are used for different aesthetic and political purposes at different historical moments in relation to broader cultural issues. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s medievalism reaches out to a number of radical and reactionary Victorian claims on the chivalric past—from A.W. Pugin’s conservative interest in the ‘Gothic Revival’ to William Morris’s Utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere (1891).

Chrétien de Troyes’ five poems (late twelfth century) and Gottfried von Strassburg’s German Tristan und Iseult (c. 1210) are the literary centrepieces of the genre of chivalric romance. The genre came late to England, but it has been estimated that over a hundred examples exist, the best of which is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375). Malory’s late fifteenth-century translation, collection and extension of the romances, the Morte d’Arthur, may be considered as the last version of the genre properly understood.

Matthew Arnold’s view was that poetry would gradually take over a large part of the ground occupied by religion. T.S. Eliot mocked Arnold for this ([1930] 1951, p. 434); but if we can broaden the term ‘poetry’ and include all the arts, then it could be said that Arnold’s prediction has been proved right. The practice of formal religion in Western society has declined in the past hundred years, while for a sizeable section of the population (though still perhaps a minority) the arts—music, literature, painting, theatre, one or all of these—represent man’s highest intellectual and spiritual achievements and are the source of anything from relaxation and superior entertainment through to enlightenment and exaltation.

In the present century, although a great deal of thought has been given to the nature, status and function of the poetic image, the emphasis of modernist and postmodern poets on spoken language—an emphasis made more than ever possible by the freeing-up of poetic forms—has reduced the predominance of imagery as a prime element in poetic language. It used to be said (citing Aristotle) that the use of metaphor was a measure of genius, and that a simile was only a weak metaphor, lacking the courage of its convictions. Today it is at least as plausible to reverse the proposition and argue that a metaphor is only a simile laying claim to an exactness it does not possess; and that poetic imagery can too easily become a short-cut.