This Companion to Victorian Poetry provides an up-to-date introduction to many of the pressing issues that absorbed the attention of poets from the 1830s to the 1890s. It introduces readers to a range of topics - including historicism, patriotism, prosody, and religious belief. The thirteen specially- commissioned chapters offer fresh insights into the works of well-known figures such as Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson and the writings of women poets - like Michael Field, Amy Levy, and Augusta Webster - whose contribution to Victorian culture has only recently been acknowledged by modern scholars. Revealing the breadth of the Victorians' experiments with poetic form, this Companion also discloses the extent to which their writings addressed the prominent intellectual and social questions of the day. The volume, which will be of interest to scholars and students alike, features a detailed chronology of the Victorian period and a compre- hensive guide to further reading. Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO VICTORIAN POETRY Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 CAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy The Cambridge Companion to Henry David edited by P. E. 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Gies Will The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO VICTORIAN POETRY EDITED BY JOSEPH BRISTOW CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY IOOI 1-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vie 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 Third printing 2005 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Sabon 10/13 pt. System 3 B2 [CE] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloging in publication data The Cambridge companion to Victorian poetry / edited by Joseph Bristow. p. cm. - (Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o 521 64115 2 (hardback) o 521 64680 4 (paperback) 1. English poetry- 19th century - History and criticism. 2. Bristow, Joseph. II. Series. PR591.C36 2000 821'.309 -dc2i 00-020013 CIP ISBN o 521 64115 2 hardback ISBN o 521 64680 4 paperback Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 CONTENTS Notes on contributors page xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xxii Abbreviations xxiii Note on the texts xxv Chronology of publications and events xxvi Chronology of poets xxxvi 1 Reforming Victorian poetry: poetics after 1832 1 JOSEPH BRISTOW 2 "The Lady of Shalott" and the critical fortunes of Victorian poetry 2-5 KATHY ALEXIS PSOMIADES 3 Experimental form in Victorian poetry 46 E. WARWICK SLINN 4 The dramatic monologue 67 CORNELIA D.J. PEARSALL 5 Victorian meters 89 YOPIE PRINS 6 Victorian poetry and historicism 114 HILARY FRASER 7 Victorian poetry and science 137 DANIEL BROWN 8 Victorian poetry and religious diversity 159 CYNTHIA SCHEINBERG 9 The Victorian poetess 180 SUSAN BROWN Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 CONTENTS 10 The poetry of Victorian masculinities 203 THAIS E. MORGAN 11 Aesthetic and Decadent poetry 228 KAREN ALKALAY-GUT 12 Victorian poetry and patriotism 255 TRICIA LOOTENS 13 Voices of authority, voices of subversion: poetry in the late nineteenth 280 century JOHN LUCAS Glossary 302 Guide to Further Reading 3 04 Index 312 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS KAREN ALKALAY-GUT, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Tel-Aviv University, is the author of Alone in the Dawn: The Life of Adelaide Crapsey (University of Georgia Press, 1988) and many books of poetry in English and Hebrew. Her essays on Dowson, Swinburne, and Wilde have appeared in such journals as Criticism, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, and Victorian Poetry. She is now at work on a study to be titled "The Logic of Late-Victorian Poetry." JOSEPH BRISTOW is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Columbia University Press, 1995) and Sexuality (Routledge, 1997). In addition, he has edited (with Isobel Armstrong and Cath Sharrock) Victorian Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1996). He is completing a full-length study of Victorian poetry and sexual desire. DANIEL BROWN teaches English at the University of Western Australia. In 1997, he published Hopkins's Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford Uni- versity Press) and (with Hilary Fraser) English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (Addison Wesley Longman). SUSAN BROWN teaches English at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her work in Victorian poetry seeks to understand its relationship to diverse social fields including feminism, imperialism, and economics. Her current research is concentrated in the Orlando Project, a collaborative electronic history of British women's writing. HILARY FRASER, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia, is the author of The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Basil Blackwell, 1992) and (with Daniel Brown) English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (Addison Wesley Longman, 1997). She is currently working on women writing art history in nineteenth-century Britain, and is also engaged in a collaborative project on women, gender, and the nineteenth-century British periodical press. Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006