In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, first published in 1999, Matthew Campbell explores the work of four Victorian poets - Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy - as they show a consistent and innovative concern with questions of human agency and will. The Victorians saw the virtues attendant upon a strong will as central to themselves and to their culture, and Victorian poetry strove to find an aesthetic form to represent this sense of the human will. Through close study of the metre, rhyme and rhythm of a wide range of poems - including monologue, lyric and elegy - Campbell reveals how closely technical questions of poetics are related, in the work of these poets, to issues of psychology, ethics and social change. He goes on to discuss more general questions of poetics, and the implications of the achievement of the Victorian poets in a wider context, from Milton through Romanticism and into contemporary critical debate.

"Engaging with literary, musical, philosophical and scientific thinking, Ewan Jones explores the birth of "rhythm" in the Victorian poetry of Robert Browning, George Eliot, Edmund Spenser, and others. The book demonstrates the vital importance of poetry to disciplines as varied as speech therapy, idealist philosophy, anthropology, and the thermal sciences, as they come to formulate rhythm for the first time"--

This volume distils into two hundred pages some of the most influential poetry of the Victorian period. Distils into one volume the key poems of the Victorian era. Organised chronologically, allowing readers to perceive continuities and changes through the century. Includes a general introduction, giving readers an overview of the poets and the period. Represents texts in their entirety where possible.

Reading Victorian Poetry “Richard Cronin’s exceptionally fine book carries out just what its title promises – reading. The pleasure of his adroit, meticulously imaginative insights into verbal and metrical effects is constant … One of the best general readings of Victorian poetry in the last ten years.” Victorian Studies “Reading Victorian Poetry will make an excellent introduction to Victorian poetry and gives a good account of a number of key issues.” English Studies Reading Victorian Poetry offers close readings of poems from the Victorian era, carefully selected by the author to reflect the breadth and diversity of nineteenth-century poetry. Richard Cronin’s outstanding consideration of a wide range of poets reflects the unusual diversity of Victorian poetry, which includes, amongst others, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book investigates key concerns of the era in which poetry was ousted by the novel from the culturally central position that it had enjoyed for centuries. The result is an important and exciting contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century poetry, and a crucial resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt about the validity of feeling led to the depiction of the literary heart as alienated, distant, outside the control of mind and will. This coincided with a notable rise in medical literature specifically concerned with the pathological heart, and with the development of new techniques and instruments of investigation such as the stethoscope. As poets feared for the health of their own hearts, their poetry embodies concerns about a widespread culture of heartsickness in both form and content. In addition, concerns about the heart's status and actions reflect upon questions of religious faith and doubt, and feed into issues of gender and nationalism. This book argues that it is vital to understand how this wider culture of the heart informed poetry and was in turn influenced by poetic constructs. Individual chapters on Barrett Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson explore the vital presence of the heart in major works by these poets - including Aurora Leigh, 'Empedocles on Etna', In Memoriam, and Maud - while the wide-ranging opening chapters present an argument for the mutual influence of poetry and physiology in the period and trace the development of new theories of rhythm as organic and affective.

Introduces the poetry of the Victorian era (including writers like Browning, Rossetti and Tennyson) and its social, cultural and political contexts.