• Skilfully conveys the breadth and diversity of nineteenth-century poetry
• Offers an ideal balance of canonical and less well-known writers

• Allows readers to explore the poetry of the Victorian era, through the eyes of one of the most renowned scholars in the field

• Poets covered include Matthew Arnold,  Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, A. H. Clough, G. M. Hopkins, Edward Lear, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde

Richard Cronin is emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His publications include 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (1998), The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (2000), Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (2002), A Companion to Victorian Poetry (co-edited with Antony H. Harrison and Alison Chapman, Wiley Blackwell, 2002, 2007), Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (2010), and the 21st-Century Oxford Authors’ Robert Browning (co-edited with Dorothy McMillan, 2015).

1 Introduction: The Victorian Poetry Palace 1

2 The Divided Self and the Dramatic Monologue 27

3 Victorian Metrics 65

4 Short Poems, Long Poems and the Victorian Sonnet Sequence 89

5 Victorian Poetry and Translation 114

6 Victorian Poetry and Life 141

7 Poetry and Religion 174

8 Conclusion: The 1890s 196

Bibliography 220

Index 229