Victorian Poets Research Articles

Aurora Leigh, A Life-Drama , and Victorian Poetic Autobiography

This essay identifies A Life-Drama , a long poem by the working-class poet Alexander Smith, as a model for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic Aurora Leigh . Barrett Browning wrote Aurora Leigh in part to protest the unevenness of the literary playing field. Since Smith and Barrett Browning became the most salient exceptions to the respective marginalization of working-class and female poets from the highest levels of mid-Victorian critical praise, her strategic reliance upon his techniques becomes a noteworthy point of analysis.

Between ‘thisness’ and quiddity: The place of the GP

The role of the GP is to apply their knowledge of medicine, science, the arts, to an individual patient in front of them. Two philosophical concepts from the 13th century can help us here. ‘Thisness,’ ‘haecceity’ is the characteristics of the being that make it that particular being. The thisness of my dog lies in the way she wags her tail, prefers ball games even to food, twitches her nose; all the things that make her just herself and not another dog. All things have thisness, not just people and dogs. A rock will have an individual essence which makes it just this rock and not another one. The 13th century philosopher Duns Scotus1 popularised the notion of haecceity, adapting it from Aristotle, and he has had many admirers down the centuries, including the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (who in 1915 wrote his habilitation thesis on the philosophy of Duns Scotus.) But it was the Victorian poet and Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who coined ‘thisness’ as an English word meaning haecceity. He memorably uses the concept in his …

Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Gail Marshall (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Gail Marshall Katherine Scheil Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Gail Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 464. $99.00 (Cloth). From the establishment of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, with its first acquisition of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, to the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1879, the nineteenth century was a vital period in the history and formation of Shakespeare as a literary and cultural figure. Gail Marshall’s goal in her comprehensive collection Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century is to demonstrate Shakespeare as “a living presence” and to show the “symbiotic relationship” between Shakespeare and “readers, actors, critics, audience and interpreters” (1–2) during this crucial era. Marshall is keen to show that Shakespeare in the nineteenth century was not just the “darling of civic bodies” but rather that he “belonged just as much to the ordinary people of Britain who used his voice to contest contemporary power distribution” (2). Because this journal focuses on Shakespeare in performance, I will give more attention to those components of this rich collection that pertain to performance concerns. In addition to many innovative chapters discussed below, Marshall’s collection thoroughly covers the basics, like Christopher Decker’s chapter on “Shakespeare editions” which distils material from over eight hundred editions into a readable chapter-length study that shows how Shakespeare “was absorbed into the mass-market enterprise of nineteenth-century commercial publishing” (16). Mark Hollingsworth builds on this publishing industry in his chapter on “Shakespeare Criticism,” covering the vastly growing field of Shakespeare study in the period, including Shakespeare societies and the development of academic and leisure study of Shakespeare, through such figures as A.C. Bradley, Mary Cowden Clarke, F. J. Furnivall, Anna Jameson, Charles and Mary Lamb, Algernon [End Page 326] Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. Hollingsworth also contributed the appendix on nineteenth-century works about Shakespeare, where he provides a short summary of the major critical works as well as brief biographical details about authors, from the Bowdlers to Oscar Wilde. One might wonder why this material is also covered in a separate chapter, though the appendix does allow one to find details about works and authors more quickly than reading through a discursive chapter. Several chapters look at Shakespeare in various forms of writing, such as Gail Marshall’s “Shakespeare and Fiction,” which examines the influence of Shakespeare’s characters, plots, and language from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy. According to Marshall’s analysis, Shakespeare frequently “loomed forebodingly as one necessarily to be confronted” (99), particularly by women writers seeking their own voice. The chapter “Women and Shakespeare” by Georgianna Ziegler further considers Shakespeare’s role in women’s education, from family readings to domestic performance. Ziegler focuses mainly on middle-class women’s intersections with Shakespeare, including reading and study practices, and their use of Shakespeare’s heroines as role models. Philip Shaw and Gail Marshall’s “Shakespeare and Poetry” explores the complicated relationship between Shakespeare and Romantic and Victorian poets, both as an influence and as a figure of legacy, but also as a model writer who was able to “bridge the gap between private and public spaces” (125). Kathryn Prince’s “Shakespeare in the Periodicals” focuses on the wide variety of readers who were able to encounter Shakespeare, often for the first time, as a figure of education for young girls and boys, and as a working-class hero or “icon of English masculinity” (60). Prince shows that Shakespeare was often connected to current events, helping to make Shakespeare more of a contemporary, in touch with the working class in particular. A number of essays in this collection focus on various geographical manifestations of nineteenth-century Shakespeare. Frederick Burwick’s “Shakespeare and Germany” looks mainly at the “Germanizing of Shakespeare,” which resulted in establishing his plays “in the literature of the nation” (314), and culminated in the lineup of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller as German national poets. John Stokes’s “Shakespeare in Europe” argues that Shakespeare was both an inspiration and a medium for European theatre in the period. Most Europeans knew Shakespeare as a “translated foreigner,” but Stokes...

Charles LaPorte, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible

Charles LaPorte, <i>Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible</i>

The Dual Perspectives in James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night

This paper will deal primarily with Thomson's interesting dual perspectives employed in portraying the Victorian life's crises depicted in his masterpiece The City of Dreadful Night. Each of these perspectives will be analyzed according to its face value first, and then according to what might a gifted writer, like Thomson, had in mind and yearned symbolically to declare by adopting such a method in writing the poem. The City of Dreadful Night has earned justly the Victorian poet James Thomson (B. V.) a distinct place in English literature. It is a unique poem in its insightful earnestness, force of thought and its pointed verses; that turned it into a truly remarkable poem, deserving to be considered a predecessor to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. The City of Dreadful Night is an extremely intriguing poem; not just for the dark vision of humanity and its future the poem presents, but precisely for the multiplicity of levels with which its poet handles such an enigmatic topic.

The modern portrait poem: from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound

In The Modern Portrait Poem, Frances Dickey recovers the portrait as a poetic genre from the 1860s through the 1920s. Combining literary and art history, she examines the ways Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. Whistler transformed the genre of portraiture in both painting and poetry. She then shows how their new ways of looking at and thinking about the portrait subject migrated across the Atlantic to influence Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, and other poets. These poets creatively exposed the Victorian portrait to new influences ranging from Manet's realism to modern dance, Futurism, and American avant-garde art. They also condensed, expanded, and combined the genre with other literary modes including epitaph, pastoral, and Bildungsroman. Dickey challenges the tendency to view Modernism as a break with the past and as a transition from aural to visual orientation. She argues that the Victorian poets and painters inspired the new generation of Modernists to test their vision of Aestheticism against their perception of modernity and the relationship between image and text. In bridging historical periods, national boundaries, and disciplinary distinctions, Dickey makes a case for the continuity of this genre over the Victorian/Modernist divide and from Britain to the United States in a time of rapid change in the arts.

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible by Charles LaPorte (review)

Reviewed by: Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible by Charles LaPorte Wendy Williams (bio) Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible by Charles LaPorte; pp. 284. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011. $50.27 cloth. In Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible, Charles LaPorte challenges literary histories that emphasize the secularization of nineteenth-century England, arguing that religion played a vital role in society. He traces the impact of higher criticism—the practice of studying the Christian scriptures as mythical and poetical rather than as factual—on Victorian literary and religious culture by examining the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Robert Browning, George Eliot, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, prominent mid-Victorian poets who responded to higher criticism and found ways to express religious truth through their poetry. In his introduction, LaPorte explains that as Victorians assimilated scientific discovery and re-evaluated biblical inspiration, some came to associate the Bible’s poetic nature with its religious meaning. The higher critical focus on the poetic and mythological character of the Bible allowed for the possibility of the existence of new sacred texts. Victorian poets, excited by the prospect of participating in an open canon, took on prophetic roles and even came to see their own poems as inspired texts. Chapter 1 charts the progression of Barrett Browning’s religious view of poetry and, in particular, her struggle to find a literary model that reconciled evangelical Christian beliefs with her belief in the Romantic cult of poetry. LaPorte shows how her early poems “Sounds” and “Earth and Her Praisers” reveal conflict between her religious and poetic visions and examines how this conflict comes to an initial resolution in the 1830s and 1840s with her reading of François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand’s apology, Le Génie du Christianisme (1802). LaPorte discusses Chateaubriand’s influence on Barrett Browning in his analysis of “The Seraphim” (1838), a poem that balances traditional hermeneutics and an inspired poetic vision, and Emanuel Swedenborg’s influence in his analysis of Aurora Leigh (1856), concluding that although Barrett Browning disavowed the findings of the higher critics, she found common ground with them in her belief in poetry’s potential to reveal God’s divine presence. The second chapter addresses the religious implications of Tennyson’s Arthurian epic, The Idylls of the King (1859–85). Tennyson, LaPorte asserts, [End Page 219] endorsed a higher critical mode of thinking in his poem by encouraging a parallel view of British national history and Arthurian legend. Tennyson admitted to the mythological nature of The Idylls and asked readers to embrace mythological tradition, despite its doubtful foundation, as an important part of England’s national history. He thus implicitly encouraged an analogous, poetical view of the Bible as a historical-mythological sacred text. LaPorte adeptly argues that Tennyson’s strategy, unlike his message, stood in contrast to that of higher critics like David Strauss, who, in his Life of Jesus (1835–36), invited outrage for forcefully advancing a mythological reading of the Bible. During a time of national religious crisis, Tennyson comforted Victorian readers facing a changing understanding of the Bible by offering a palatable, literary example of historical criticism. In chapter 3, LaPorte traces Clough’s complex views on higher criticism and poetic ambition in his readings of “Epi-Strauss-ium” (1862), “Easter Day: Naples, 1849” (1865), Amours de Voyage (1858), and Dipsychus and the Spirit (1865). LaPorte discourages the trend of reading Clough autobiographically and as representative of Victorian religious conflict. Instead, he favours reading Clough’s poetry as a forum in which Clough explores his philosophical principles. LaPorte focuses most of his analysis on Dipsychus, discussing Clough’s view of the value of redemptive literature. The poem, LaPorte maintains, critiques Victorian readiness to make English literature sacred, suggesting that poetry provides no better moral influence than the ancient scriptures. LaPorte discusses the higher critical hermeneutics and religious influence of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69)in chapter 4, arguing that Browning’s murder story, based on supposed history, both reflected his implicitly religious belief in the potential for sacred truth to be found in a melding of fact and fiction and served as an analogy...

Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles (ed.), William Morris in the Twenty-First Century

This collection is devoted to assessments of the work of William Morris (1834–96), Victorian poet, designer and socialist theorist of art and labor. Of thirteen articles, six are devoted to his poetry and romances. In ‘Versions of Ecotopia in News from Nowhere’ (93–106), Tony Pinkney considers the familiar problem of whether Morris’s utopia is static. He finds four of John Ruskin’s ‘elements of life’ present in Morris’s work (namely ‘Pure Air, [Pure] Water, and Earth’), but not the fifth (‘Fi...

Victorian Poets, Politics, and Networks: Response

Response Linda H. Peterson (bio) How did Victorian poets and their poetry engage in contemporary debates about pressing social, religious, and political questions? The 2012 conference theme, “Networks,” encouraged poetry specialists to consider the periodical and publishing contexts that featured verse commentary on contemporary issues; the social networks that led poets to develop—or reject—positions taken by fellow writers; and the literary transformations that occurred as verse moved among poets, between continents, and from one publishing venue to another. This emphasis on poetry as embedded in history and, even more, as attempting to alter the course of history signals a notable shift in scholarly attitudes over the past fifty years. When the original editors of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals set their criteria for inclusion, they omitted poetry—a decision they believed “readily defensible.” Partly, the defense was practical, citing the sheer quantity of periodical verse they would need to index (over 7,000 items). Mostly, it was evaluative: “To have included verse would have added an enormous number of worthless items to Part A [the title index] and a large number of obscure authors to be identified and then described in Part B [the author index]” (Houghton, Introduction xvi).1 This editorial decision, as Linda K. Hughes has noted, presumed a predominance of sentimental verse in newspapers and magazines and an “association of poetry with ‘filler’” (92). It failed to account for major poems first published in periodicals and for the significance of occasional verse in which poets engaged the questions of their day. Even more, it presumed that prose, however well or poorly written, was the medium for contending with serious social and political issues, whereas poetry was for expressing feelings or offering secondary commentary. All three papers in this cluster take a different view of poetry and political engagement. Alison Chapman’s “Poetry, Network, Nation” [End Page 309] demonstrates how British and American expatriate poets in Italy used periodical verse to endorse Italian Unification (Risorgimento). Concentrating on three women—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Isa Blagden, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope—who “placed themselves at the center of nation making,” Chapman argues that they “predicated their writing identities on a political poetics that . . . circulated by a complex European and transatlantic print and manuscript culture” (275). What the Wellesley editors might have deemed “filler” verse in The Tuscan Athenaeum—Garrow’s “Aurora Rugiadosa: Lines on Gibson’s recently finished statue of Aurora” (1848)—Chapman reads not just as praise of Gibson’s “forward-moving statue” but, more importantly, as a contribution to Italian political revolution. In ekphrastically (re)creating a “feminized angel of the Second Coming” (282), Garrow used poetry to trumpet the cause and link herself with other liberal, pro-Risorgimento artists. Gibson’s sculpture and Garrow’s “Aurora Rugiadosa” became, in turn, sources for Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an iconic woman poet expressing her own literary and political agency. While we may today remember only Aurora Leigh (1856), the verse novel that crowns Barrett Browning’s career, Chapman recovers the culture of print, sociability, and politics of which it is a part and thereby enriches our understanding of the literary networks through which women poets worked for political change. Kirstie Blair’s “Transatlantic Tractarians” takes up a different issue in a transnational exchange: the state of High Church Anglicanism in Britain and North America. Oxford Movement writers felt themselves beleaguered at home, disillusioned with the state of the English Church, yet hopeful about possibilities across the Atlantic. In the British Critic of 1839, Newman lamented: “the rest of the Church, either caring nothing for us, or accounting it a point of charity to wish us dead, and the State intruding its well-meant but unamiable blandishments, it is pleasant to look across the western wave, and discern a friendly star breathing peace and shedding benison” (312). Poet-priests of the American Episcopal Church responded to such transatlantic appeals by expressing “honour [to] their nursing mother” but also by asserting the vitality of their native church “in all the vigour of youth, adapting itself to a fresh state of society” (Coxe, Christian Ballads viii). Thus, while American poets learned from their British counterparts, they also produced new...

Review of 'Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible' by Charles LaPorte

Review of 'Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible' by Charles LaPorte

&lt;em&gt;Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible&lt;/em&gt;, by Charles LaPorte

&lt;em&gt;Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible&lt;/em&gt;, by Charles LaPorte

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible

&lt;em&gt;Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice&lt;/em&gt;, by Britta Martens

&lt;em&gt;Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice&lt;/em&gt;, by Britta Martens

&lt;em&gt;Reading Victorian Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, by Richard Cronin

Reviewed by: Reading Victorian Poetry by Richard Cronin Isobel Armstrong (bio) Reading Victorian Poetry, by Richard Cronin; pp. 238. Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, £60.00, $99.95. 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. He is an adept reader of form and meaning, whether this is Walt Whitman’s “heady paratactic expansiveness” (90), or Alfred Tennyson’s incisive alliteration of “falter” and “firmly” in In Memoriam (1850), where “the thirteenth line is firm if read iambically, but falters if trochees are allowed to intrude” (164). He notes that Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) carries only one half rhyme, “breath,” rhyming, with significant hesitancy, with “faith” (qtd. in Cronin 158). If the subject of A. C. Swinburne’s “Anactoria” (1866) is enjoined to crush Sappho’s love with “cruel faultless feet,” his lines “deploy metrical feet that stamp themselves on the reader’s ear just as pitilessly” (126). And in Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855) “the feet, metrical and corporeal, break into a little dance, a soft shoe shuffle” (149). Cronin’s eye and ear for verbal detail is matched by his capacity to invoke just the right historical detail. The image of the door in Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret” (1862) gains from his reminder that Rossetti sat for the head of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World” in 1853, where Hunt used a quotation from Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door.” He has taken the trouble to check Browning’s reference to George Whitefield’s Hymns for Social Worship (1753) in “Christmas-Eve” (1850), disclosing the relevance of Whitefield’s title to collective worship. This incisiveness extends to Cronin’s capacity for telling epigram: of Tennyson’s Maud (1855) he writes, “I doubt that any poem in English keeps its finger so attentively on its own pulse” (76); of religious feeling he asserts, “It is the atheist poetry of the century that cultivates evangelical fervour more impressively than the Christian” (193). Both at the beginning and the end of his book he claims that to explore the variety of Victorian poetry is his main project. But I think he is doing something much more searching and original than this unobjectionable but bland assertion suggests. To be sure, his method and organization is calculated to bring out the plenitude and heterogeneous experiment in Victorian poetry. Cronin imaginatively juxtaposes a range of poets, male and female, in each chapter—Tennyson, Augusta Webster, Browning, the Spasmodics, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Amy Levy, for instance—not allowing any one to take precedence. (Though Dante Gabriel Rossetti, deservedly through Cronin’s subtle readings, takes an unusually prominent place.) The mix of poets is paralleled by an eclectic mix of texts. Chapter 6 is an example, where cohabit Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” (1870), Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830) and Idylls of the King (1859–85), Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864) (this last given a particularly sophisticated and thoughtful reading), and Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Cronin’s hidden project begins in his first chapter, where, through brilliant and enjoyable close readings of Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art” (1833, revised 1842), Rossetti’s “The Burden of Ninevah” (1856), and John Davidson’s “The Crystal Palace” (1908), he brings together three poems concerned with a new culture of display exemplified by the museum and popular spectacle at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. He examines the Victorian poet’s unease with the democratization of culture, with poetry’s isolation from daily life, and with its compromised status as a secondary form freighted [End Page 556] with the weight of history. A troubled aesthetic of fracture emerged, but one that responded to the new modern situation with vitality and inventiveness. I take from Cronin’s argument that it was the aesthetics of fracture, so concerned with belatedness, that paradoxically gave Victorian poetry its originality, its unique energy and creativity. The central chapters explore the many ways the formal expression of that fracture emerge—the double poem...

BRITTA MARTENS. Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice.

BRITTA MARTENS. Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice.

The Religion Of Art, Art For Art’s Sake: Dante Gabriel Rossetti And Walter Pater

This article assesses the meaning of the phrase “the religion of art” in the nineteenth century, taking “art” to denote literature, painting and sculpture, and focuses this question in relation to two central ideas: to the Coleridgean “Symbol” (his famous tautegorical figure), and to the conceptual provenance and meaning of the phrase “art for art’s sake” (an apparent tautology). From the former it traces contrasting paths for the idea of the “translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal” (The Statesman’s Manual 30). One is via the “art for art’s sake” movement and aestheticism (with close attention to Walter Pater’s writings), drawing upon Romantic Hellenism in order to challenge Christian ideas of transcendence. The other is through the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in which a relationship is posited between the Victorian poet and his Catholic antitype. The religion of art as it manifested itself in the 1840s and 50s is, I shall argue, significantly different from the religion of art as it emerged in Paterian aestheticism later in the century.

Negation, Selection and Substitution: Charlotte Brontë's Feminist Poetics

This article examines an early dramatic monologue by Charlotte Brontë and finds that Brontë pre-dates Victorian women poets in use of the form. Her early practice makes her a contemporary of Robert Browning and gives her precedence over Alfred Tennyson. The study investigates both how Brontë developed the form and why she introduced it into poetry. Without denying her childhood training in depiction of fictional figures, the findings point in the direction of Brontë's readings in seventeenth-century drama and her earlier writing of a short play as a more directly relevant background that made the monologue possible. Her personal motive for using it in poetry is initially a reaction to Robert Southey's discouraging response to her experience of poetry writing. The poem complains of literary marginalisation and asserts female poetic potentials. It embodies Brontë's culturally forbidden dream in an objective manner. However, the dramatic form proves to be more than a personal mask. It allows Brontë to contradict Romantic ideology and challenge patriarchal culture. Brontë's experience with the dramatic monologue in this poem on both formal and contextual levels should grant her better recognition in the poetic canon than that assigned to her so far.

Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian LiteratureSecond Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature. Catherine Maxwell. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. Pp. xi+260.

<i>Catherine Maxwell</i>, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature<i>Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature</i>. Catherine Maxwell. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. Pp. xi+260.

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible

This book review examines University of Washington professor Charles LaPorte's most recent work, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. LaPorte attempts to revise the model conventionally attributed to Victorian poetry as merely a product of Victorian culture. The chaste conservatism and religious dogmatism of Victorian culture may have been a reactionary attempt to salvage faith in the wake of doubt among the scientific community and even various disciplines of the humanities (most notably, finding the creation myth incompatible with Darwin's theory of evolution, and the biblical accounts generally spurious in terms of historicity). Through an examination of the life and works of the Brownings, Tennyson, Clough, and Eliot, LaPorte argues that Victorian poetry actually embraced this doubt as the prospect for an open canon to which inspired poets could contribute new scriptures.

Victorian Poetry When?

From his work on dissenting religious traditions to the significance of intertextual writing and reading practices and the status of critical theory in literary studies, Valentine Cunningham has shaped for himself a scholarly guise at once robustly intellectual and critically jocose. His critical voice – homiletic and idiosyncratic – resonates with a deep commitment to literary texts as well as a perceptive and often provocative humour that is not without hostility to those critics he feels are disrespectful of the traditions with which he is engaged. One such tradition is Victorian poetry, a subject that Cunningham explains appeared before him in its ‘multi-pronged complexity’ (p. vii) during editorial work on his The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2000). As the title of this compilation betrays, the ‘real’ Victorians themselves secured Cunningham's main interest as editor of the volume, an interest that he reiterates in his new book, Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics. ‘My sub-title’, he writes, ‘puts “poets” first, because I'm not afraid of the fact that poems are produced by poets, actual men and women, living in the real world, who are the actual thinking, feeling, writing channels for all the contents and discontents which poems evince’ (p. vii). For Cunningham, Victorian poets are historically embedded, self-consciously poeticizing and aestheticizing beings who position themselves through both newness (Cunningham devotes discussions to their construction of selfhood, modernity, ‘fleshliness’, and formal innovation) and reception (in their narrations of Biblical texts, Shakespeare, Dante, medievalism, classicism). The age in which they write is, after all, ‘the most aweingly productive period of poetry there's ever been, in any language’ (p. vi), Cunningham claims, and his book is in part a way to make sense of, give value to, reveal the intricacy of, and take pleasure in, the reading experience of such poetry.