Percy Bysshe Shelley George Gordon Byron is regarded as the second generation of England romantics

Arnold and Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a more impersonal manner. His greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gipsy”) is, however, always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and became, with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious criticism.

Arnold’s friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical liveliness, unequaled in Victorian verse.

Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He continued thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution (1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously postrevolutionary age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) combined the Romantic idea of the genius with a further statement of German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle opposed to the influential doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing, in Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic” denunciations of laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics. The first importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in Modern Painters (5 vol., 1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged an appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol., 1851–53), Ruskin took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present and gave it a poetic fullness and force. This imaginative engagement with social and economic problems continued into Unto This Last (1860), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry Newman was a poet, novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts for the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to reassert the Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent religious development is memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), one of the many great autobiographies of this
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