One of the characteristic features of Victorian poetry is dimness,
a vanishing away-things blur with the motion of their passing,
which seems inseparable from the mind's fading as it lets them go.
Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and the young Yeats are elegists of
the self; they render life as transparent, ghostlike, dissolving,
ungraspable, nearly unrememberable. This vanishing away, this
dimness, of Victorian poetry is most obvious in the twilights,
mists, shadows, deep horizons, and flowing waters of its central
landscape, but it is also a matter of sound and syntax, of
repetition and rhythm, texture and line movement. Vanishing Lives
examines these features and links them to larger issues, such as
the psychology of the individual poets, and the Victorian and
modern frames of mind. The tendencies under consideration are less
ideas than forms or styles of feeling. They are so universal in the
nineteenth century that they may not seem to call for comment, but
for all their vagueness they are deep, powerful, resistant to
change-an essential stratum of the experience of Victorian poetry.
For poets like Yeats, who struggled to move beyond them, they were
far more than the trappings of an outmoded poetry. They were a
deeply ingrained aesthetic, a style, a morality, not only a way of
art to be revised, but a way of living to be outgrown-a Tennysonian
way.
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