Yes, I'd have to agree with Roger on that one.
I'm certainly not prepared to go to the barricades over Orwell's phrase. It just struck me as a handy label to use for this thread. Essentially I'm talking about poems that are generally in critical disfavour but which people might like to defend. So, yes, if we're talking about Victorian poetry, the most obvious fault is likely to be sentimentality; as Wendy says, if we can forgive it in Dickens, then maybe we should be able to forgive it in some of these poets as well. But sentimentality isn't the only problem, of course; in some cases critical taste has simply moved against over-emphatic metrical patterns (Swinburne being an obvious example); in others, it may just be the case that we're no longer used to melodramatic narratives in verse form.
Anybody want to take up the cause of Robert W. Service?
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