The Penguin Book Of Victorian Verse

Daniel Karlin has selected poetry written and published during the reign of Queen Victoria, (1837-1901). Giving pride of place to Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the volume offers generous selections from other major poets such asArnold, Emily Bronte, Hardy and Hopkins, and makes room for several poem-sequences in their entirety. It is wonderful, too, in its discovery and inclusion of eccentric, dissenting, un-Victorian voices, poets who squarely refuse to 'represent' their period. It also includes the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, James Thomson and Augusta Webster.

From Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" to Arnold's "Dover Beach", works from all of the great victorian poets are collected in this anthology, which features a short biography on each poet and an insightful introduction by the editor.

From Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" to Arnold's "Dover Beach", works from all of the great victorian poets are collected in this anthology, which features a short biography on each poet and an insightful introduction by the editor.

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.

Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology presents a wonderfully varied collection of Victorian poetry, with 560 poems by 115 authors. The great figures of the period - Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Hopkins - are strongly represented, but light verse and nonsense poetry have not been neglected. With most poems given in their entirety, this is a lively and exciting anthology of Victorian verse selected by an expert in the field.