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
