The Victorians : an anthology of poetry and poetics

Valentine Cunningham's magnificent anthology presents the cornucopia of Victorian poetry as never before within a single volume.All the major poets of the period - Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Clare, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Brontes, the Rossettis, George Eliot, Swinburne, William Morris, Housman, Hardy, Wilde, Yeats - are very generously represented, with complete texts of a wide range of key poems.

Also represented are many of the writers who are on the cusp of the central canon.Here is unique access to the immense and arresting variety of Victorian poetic producers - the street balladists and self-taught working-class poets, the Pre-Raphaelites, Spasmodics, medievalizers, university wits, social realists, hymn-writers, satirists, parodists, story-tellers, symbolists and decadents - all variously engaged in the big issues of the time - faith and doubt, sexuality, gender roles, war, imperialism, poverty, industrialism, the city, the natural world, the functions of writing and criticism: everything, in short, from snow to dentists, cod-liver oil to angels in the house, railway trains to hexameters.In addition, the great conversation going on within Victorian poetry about the role of the poet and the nature of poetry and poetic work is afforced by main prose pieces from the period's critical debate, not least in the journals and reviews.