Crisis Of Faith In Victorian Poetry

The Victorian era was one teetering on the edge of a revolution. It was an age of scientific, economic and industrial revolution, but most notably, it was an age of a mass existential crisis. The publishing of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” caused a seismic shift in the lives of the Victorians by contradicting both the scientific knowledge and religious views of society at that time. Not only did it go against every creation story told in the bible, it also gave scientists proof that the earth was much older than they had thought, reducing all of humanity to just a fraction of a second on the timeline of the universe.
In order to outline the ways this crisis of faith was reflected in Victorian poetry it is only appropriate to start with a poet

While not as direct as Arnold, pieces of Tennyson’s shattered faith can be found tucked inside the lines of his poems “The Lotus Eaters” and “Ulysses”. Tennyson’s poetry reflected how Victorians felt lost, alone without the reliance of a divine being that dictated their life. Unlike Arnold, he had some air of hopefulness peppered throughout his melancholy. In “The Lotos Eaters” Tennyson opens with Ulysses and his sailormen stranded on the island know from The Odyssey to be inhabited by a people who do nothing but eat the fruit of a plant that puts you in a euphoric state of lethargy. Here his speaker is conflicted between his victorian side, his hopes to return home and fufill his duty to his kingdom as well as family, and his desire to disregard humanity and stay in land of the Lotos, where everything seems to be, but nothing actually is. This alludes to the Victorians who still held onto their beliefs even though they no longer had a foundation. The eating of the lotos is portrayed as involving the abandonment of external reality, and instead living in “a land where all things always seemed the same”. Through delicately crafted figurative language, Tennyson also hints at the idea of living in this turmoil free world as cowardice. This showed his longing to keep things the way they are, but knowing that change in life is necessary, and that he must indulge in the desire to press on into the