The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse

This radical reassessment of the Victorians and their poetry demonstrates what a great variety of poetry and poets the period produced. The collection contains 560 poems by 115 poets - from nonsense verse to nature poetry, and from Tennyson to Oscar Wilde.

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This anthology displays the variety and power of Victorian verse, and the innovation and creativity with which poets resisted the bad propensities of the era through which they lived. The great figures are strongly represented - Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne and Hopkins - but not so as to crowd out the equally rewarding facets of light verse and nonsense, of grotesquerie and protest. Justice is done to the poignant directness of "the true voice of feeling", from William Barnes and John Clare, through Emily Jane Bronte and Christina G. Rossetti, to Thomas Hardy. An unprecedented feature of the anthology is the respect shown to the integrity of the 560 poems: poems are here printed in their entirety, excerpts being made only of those units to which the poet gave a distinct autonomy. Four substantial masterpieces are reproduced in full: Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", Edward FitzGerald's "Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam", Christina G. Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Arthur Hugh Clough's superb verse-novel of love ,society and revolution, "Amours de Voyage".