This book represents the first scholarly gathering together of the long-neglected poetry of the School Inspector, educationalist and philosopher Edmond Holmes (1850 – 1936). Alongside a generous selection from Holmes’s six volumes of poetry there is also a full reproduction of Holmes’s essay What is Poetry which served to delineate his thinking on the discipline. Supporting these original works is both a lengthy scholarly introduction and extensive endnotes which serve to locate Holmes’s poetry not merely within the context of its time and amongst his own contemporaries but also to make a case for the importance of this body of work in its own right particularly in its promulgation of original and innovative ideas. Holmes’s poetry represents a particularly unique combination of traditional verse form coupled with innovative and esoteric subject matter (often drawing upon Eastern Buddhist philosophy as well as Western Romanticism and Pantheism) and so deserves to be more widely recognized as being wholly distinctive within the canon of Victorian and Modern poetry.
