Romantic and Victorian long poems : a guide

This study provides detailed and wide-ranging accounts of all the varieties of long poem - epic, romance, verse-novel and sequences - published in the romantic and Victorian periods.

Writers in the 19th century saw these grand poetic projects as their greatest achievements and Adam Roberts's summaries and critical accounts of these seek to render them accessible to the modern student, researcher and general reader.

From famous works ("The Prelude", "In Memoriam", "The Ring and the Book") to lesser-known works (Erasmus Darwin's "The Lovers of the Plants" or Edward Lytton's "King Poppy: A Story Without an End"), this study provides a detailed book-by-book precis, contextual information, biographical entries on authors and critical entries on the categories of long poem.

A critical introduction examines why it was that the long poem was so central to romantic and Victorian art and why "epic" is still one of the weightiest modes of writing even today.