This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and contemporary contexts.

• Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings of a number of well-known poems
• Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their  works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems
• Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns
• Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological context
• Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body, and melancholy
• Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of Victorian poetry
• Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems
• Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and postmodernism