Does poetry still matter in our Twitter society? Such was the question that caught my eye during a somewhat random Google session the other day. The answers consisted of some lugubrious comments to the effect that poetry, like the novel, is dying, if not dead.
Of course it is hard to believe that poets were once considered celebrities, and that poetry was once a pre-eminent form of entertainment, as these days poetry is usually considered the property and province of the cultural elite. We also generally refrain from mentioning poetry and politics in the same breath.
'Twas not always thus. In 1821 the novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock published an essay called 'The Four Ages of Poetry'. Poetry, he wrote, started in the Age of Iron and reached its peak in the Age of Gold, after which it went downhill through the Ages of Silver and Brass. (Today he might maunder on about an Age of Plastic.)
Peacock, a Utilitarian, was particularly hard on the Romantics, even though his close friend Shelley was prominent among them. Shelley hit back with 'A Defence of Poetry', in which he declared that 'poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds'. Well, he would say that. But Shelley also famously opined that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.
Fast forward 30 years. In 1851 poet Matthew Arnold, often considered 'the forgotten Victorian', was on his honeymoon near a beach in Dover. There he began to write his famous eponymous poem, although it was not published until many years later.
Arnold is not considered to have had the mighty gifts of Tennyson or Browning, but it is also thought that he was closer to the modern mind than either of those giants. And he could apparently see the way the world was heading.
On the Origin of Species, Darwin's faith-shattering work, was not published until 1859, but in 1855 Arnold published a long poem called 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', composed during his visit to the French Carthusian monastery some years earlier. In the poem he sees himself as 'wandering between two worlds — one dead / The other powerless to be born'.
Arnold was mightily concerned about what became the issue of the age: that of the conflict between religion and science, and this is the main concern expressed in 'Dover Beach'. Arnold describes the beauty of the shore at