The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry

by Linda K. Hughes

Overview

Victorian poetry was read and enjoyed by a much larger audience than is sometimes thought. Publication in widely-circulating periodicals, reprinting in book reviews, and excerpting in novels and essays ensured that major poets such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Rossetti were household names, and they remain popular today. The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry provides an accessible overview of British poetry from 1830 to 1901, paying particular attention to its role in mass media print culture. Designed to interest both students and scholars, the book traces lively dialogues between poets and explains poets' choices of form, style and language. It also demonstrates poetry's relevance to Victorian debates on science, social justice, religion, imperialism, and art. Featuring a glossary of literary terms, a guide to further reading, and two examples of close readings of Victorian poems, this introduction is the ideal starting-point for the study of verse in the nineteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521672245
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/20/2010
Series:	Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Linda K. Hughes is Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas.

Table of Contents

List of figures ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xii

Editions cited xiii

Introducing Victorian poetry 1

Part I The forms of Victorian poetry 13

1 Victorian experimentalism 15

Dramatic monologue 15

Hybrid forms 21

Experiments in rhyme and rhythm 25

Experiments in language, image, symbol 32

Conclusion 37

2 Victorian dialogues with poetic tradition 40

Classical tradition 40

Modern European forms 64

3 The impress of print: poems, periodicals, novels 89

Periodicals and poetry 90

Poetry and Victorian novels 96

Conclusion 109

Part II The rhetoric of Victorian poetry 111

Introduction to Part II 113

4 Poetry, technology, science 118

Technology and social justice 120

Technology and poetic mobility 124

Science and the crisis of new epistemologies 128

Huxleyan poetics 134

5 Poetry and religion 140

Poetry and worship 142

Woman poets and biblical scenes 155

Poetry and religious dispute 160

6 Poetry and the heart's affections 167

Poetess verse 169

Domestic affections 173

Death and mourning 178

Erotic love and courtship 183

7 Poetry and empire 191

1851 and the Great Exhibition 194

The Indian Mutiny 196

The Scramble for Africa 202

Imperial obliquity 208

8 Poetic liberties 214

Liberty abroad 216

Liberty at home 223

Liberty for women 229

Taking liberties 235

9 Resisting rhetoric: art for art's sake 239

Aestheticism at mid-century: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám versus Tractarian poetics 241

Foreign diversions: Swinburne and French decadence 243

Platonic and Sapphic strains: same-sex desire in Pater, Symonds, Michael Field, and Wilde 246

W. B. Yeats and the resources of myth 255

Part III Coda Close readings 259

10 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh 261

11 Ernest Dowson, "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam" and Thomas Hardy, "Friends Beyond" 276

Glossary 285

Notes 286

Further reading 303

Index 310

Editorial Reviews

"By far the most important recent general study of Victorian poetry is Linda K. Hughes’s substantial Cambridge Introduction to the topic. Hughes, who has published influentially on both well-known poets such as Tennyson and lesser-known writers such as Rosamund Marriott Watson, is extremely well-placed to undertake a comprehensive project of this kind. Her chapters look at admirably broad topics such as “Victorian Experimentalism,” in which she provides an eclectic selection of works taken from every part of the period. With such a command of the field, Hughes manages to juxtapose formal and verbal innovations in poems as diverse as those by Browning, Hardy, Hopkins, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Michael Field, Arthur Symons, and John Gray. This immensely satisfying volume, which I plan to use in my classes, integrates sections that concentrate on form and rhetoric with others that address topics such as empire, liberty, and art for art’s sake."
—SEL: Studies in English Literature

"(Hughes's) 'introduction' is in fact much more than that modest title might imply, and is particularly illuminating in relating text and context, demonstrating superbly how so many poems of the period first reached the public as part of the efflorescence of mass print culture - in journals, magazines, and keepsake albums.
— Roger Ebbatson

From the Publisher