Routledge Library Editions Victorian Poetry

This set reissues 4 books on Victorian poetry originally published between 1966 and 2003. The volumes focus predominantly on the works of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. This set will be of particular interest to students of English literature.

This set reissues 4 books on Victorian poetry originally published between 1966 and 2003. The volumes focus predominantly on the works of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. This set will be of particular interest to students of English literature.

Percy Shelley is widely considered one of the most important Romantic poets of the 19th Century and was a key influence on the Victorian and pre-Raphaelite poets in the century following his death in 1822. However, for many years his writing was largely ignored in the mainstream due to the radical politics he espoused and it is only in relatively recent times he has become universally admired. Routledge Library Editions: Percy Shelley collects a broad range of scholarship ranging from examinations of Shelley’s style and political intentions to an assessment of his impact on the broader Romantic Movement. This set reissues 4 books on Percy Shelley originally published between 1945 and 2009 and will be of interest to students of literature and literary history.

The focus of this title, first published in 1989, begins with Dickinson’s poems themselves and the ways in which we read them. There are three readings for each of the six poems under consideration that are both complementary and provocative. The selected poems show Dickinson speaking of herself in increasingly wider relationships – to love, the outside world, death and eternity – and are grouped together to reveal her overlapping attitudes and feelings. Other topics discussed range from general epistemological and critical considerations to the poet’s self-identification and the process of reading her poetry as a feminist critic. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

First published in 1969, this edition collection brings together a series of essays offering a re-evaluation of Victorian poetry in the light of early 20th Century criticism. The essays in this collection concentrate upon the poets whose reputations suffered from the great redirection of energy in English criticism initiated in this century by Eliot, Richards and Leavis. What theses poets wrote about, the values they expressed, the form of the poems, the language they used, all these were examined and found wanting in some radical way. One of the results of this criticism was the renewal of interest in metaphysical and eighteenth-century poetry and corresponding ebb of enthusiasm for Romantic poetry and for Victorian poetry in particular. Most of the essays in this book take as their starting point questions raised by the debate on Victorian poetry, both earlier in this century and in the more recent past. There are essays on the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, on that of Clough, who until recently has been neglected, and Hopkins, because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that he is usually considered to be a modern poet. The volume is especially valuable in that it will give a clearer understanding of the nature of Victorian poetry, concentrating as it does on those areas of a poet’s work where critical discussion seems most necessary.

First published in 1972. Browning was a keen observer and dramatic recorder of nineteenth-century European culture; his poetry reflects a wide range of intellectual, religious and artistic issues of his day. Roy E. Gridley shows here that during the six decades of Browning’s active writing career (1832-89), his poetry is a record and an interpretation of the changing modes of thought, feeling and expression of nineteenth-century life. Browning was a ‘romantic’ who, by virtue of his realistic and often revolutionary poetry, became a ‘modern’, and had considerable influence on writers such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound. While surveying the whole of Browning’s life and work, Gridley focuses closely on the more famous poems, examining them as documents that give the general reader a deeper appreciation of the richness and diversity of life in Victorian Europe.

In a work that is uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute, Isobel Armstrong rescues Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as `a moralised form of romantic verse', and unearths its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics.