Arnold was righthis poems have been regarded as an impassioned and powerful expression of the mid-Victorian zeitgeist, particularly in its high moral seriousnessness, its anguished doubt, and its sense of the exalted, even redemptive mission of poetry. But there was, of course, no absoutely unified zeitgeist. Indeed, even during the quarter of a century designated by Arnold, a new generation of poetsnotably those loosely designated Pre-Raphaeliteswas emerging, and was making quite un-Arnoldian claims for the autonomy of poetry, for the artist's freedom from social responsibility and conventional morality.
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To appreciate fully the Victorian age in all the multitudinousness that Arnold deplored, modern readers will turn not only to his works but also to those of Tennyson, the Brownings, Clough, the Pre-Raphaelites, and hosts of others. In fact, a recent anthology of Victorian poetry includes works by well over a hundred poetspeasant poets, working-class poets, feminist poets, conservative and radical poets, religious poets, atheistic poets, regional poets, decadent poets, and nonsense poets. A necessary brevity has allowed little discussion of this vast diversity; emphasis has fallen instead on some of the ways such multitudinousness affected the dominant middle-class poets who contributed most to our sense of the "canonical" literature of the mid-Victorian period.
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 | Altick, Richard.
Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature
. New York: Norton, 1973.
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| Buckley, Jerome Hamilton.
The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.
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| Christ, Carol.
The Finer Optic: The Aesthetics of Particularity in Victorian Poetry
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
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| Culler, A. Dwight. Imaginative Reason:
The Poetry of Matthew Arnold
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
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| Greenberger, Evelyn Barish.
Arthur Hugh Clough: The Growth of a Poet's Mind
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
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| Hickock, Kathleen.
Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century Women's Poe
try. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.
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