Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems and Poetics

Poised on the brink of modernism and the twentieth century, the Victorian era was the most productive period of poetry there has ever been, in any language. This book is the definitive guide to the range of Victorian poets and poems, from the famous to the less well known. Approaching the poets and poems in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns, this absorbing book places poetry written during the nineteenth century in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological contexts, and considers the poets’ major anxieties, such as self, body, and melancholy. The author insists that rhyming and repetition are the major formal features of this (or any) poetry and focuses on the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems. The Victorians, at the helm of a global empire, were innovative and ambitious, and the poetry of the age reflects the aspirations and self–consciousness of Victorian society. Esteemed critic, Valentine Cunningham, exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and, with dazzling close readings of a number of poems, cuts through the often complex Victorian poetic form to reveal the key themes and contexts of the poems and the passions that drove the men and women who wrote them.

Part I: So Far as the Words are Concerned. 1. Words, words, words and more words. 2. Rhyming/repeating. 3. Making noise/noising truths. 4. These rhyming/repeating games are serious. Part II: Contents and Discontents of the Forms. 5. Down–sizing. 6. Selving. 7. Fleshly feelings. 8. Mourning and melancholia. 9. Modernizing the subject. 10. Victorian modernismus.

Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.  His publications include Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (1975), In The Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (Blackwell, 1994), The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (ed., Blackwell, 2000), and Reading After Theory (Blackwell, 2002).

“Victorian Poetry Now is a brilliant book, and a challenging, engaging and stimulating read.  It looks at a rich range of themes expressed by the poets, and makes one aware, if one was not aware already, that the poetry is a formidable cultural achievement.”  ( Essays in Criticism , 16 July 2013) "Valentine Cunningham has here provided us with a large volume, over 1,000 pages, surveying exhaustively and originally the entire field of Victorian poetry, both great and small. It is an impressive task excellently accomplished. Based essentially on precise and meticulous Oxford scholarship, this volume has an excellent introduction, and a formidable bibliography and index. Thus it is a permanent and invaluable guide to its subject, reliable and comprehensive. It must continue to serve that purpose probably for the rest of the twenty–first century." ( Reference Reviews )