Why the important genre in victorian age was novel while in romantic period was poetry?
Both assumptions in your question are only partly true. The novel was a major genre during the Romantic revival (not only Austen, but Burney, Scott and many others wrote in this period and had a huge following) and important poetry, almost entirely romantic in tone (Tennyson, Swinburne, Wilde, Browning…..) was being written right through the 19C up to Yeats, after whom there was a semi-Augustan backlash (with the Symbolists, Eliot etc.) and then various modernist movements (vorticists et. al.) Having said that, it is true that in literary movements verse tends to lead the way, followed by prose. The Augustan movement was well under way in poetry (with Dryden in particular) for years before we start getting prose which is notably different from that which went before. Similarly Cowper and Crabbe pioneered Romanticism long before Romantic prose was being written – and so on. So when the Romantic movement was rearing its head in verse the novel, important and popular as it was, still to
