Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader features a collection of critical essays focusing on various aspects of Victorian-era poetry from the 1830s to the 1890s. Presents key criticism on Victorian poetry Features contributions from a variety of scholars in the field Illustrates the full range of critical approaches to the Victorian poets, including attention to texts, words, forms, modes, and sub-genres Offers fresh reinterpretations, many driven by contemporary ideological interests, including gender questions, selfhood, and body issues

Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader features a collection of critical essays focusing on various aspects of Victorian-era poetry from the 1830s to the 1890s.* Presents key criticism on Victorian poetry* Features contributions from a variety of scholars in the field* Illustrates the full range of critical approaches to the Victorian poets, including attention to texts, words, forms, modes, and sub-genres* Offers fresh reinterpretations, many driven by contemporary ideological interests, including gender questions, selfhood, and body issues

Contributors viiIntroduction 11 The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry 15Gerhard Joseph2 The Mirror's Secret: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Double Work of Art 27J Hillis Miller3 Browning's Anxious Gaze 46Ann Wordsworth4 The Pragmatics of Silence, and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning's Dramatic Monologues 56Jennifer A Wagner-Lawlor5 Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric 75Herbert F Tucker6 Matthew Arnold's Gipsies: Intertextuality and the New Historicism 95Antony Harrison7 A New Radical Aesthetic: The Grotesque as Cultural Critique: Morris 118Isobel Armstrong8 Alienated Majesty: Gerard M Hopkins 143Geoffrey Hill9 Fact and Tact: Arnoldian Fact-finding and Q Tactlessness in the Reading of Gerard Hopkins 160Valentine Cunningham10 'A Thousand Times I'd be a Factory Girl': Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-Class Women's Poetry in Victorian Britain 174Susan Zlotnick11 'The fruitful feud of hers and his': Sameness, Difference, and Gender in Victorian Poetry 199Dorothy Mermin12 'Eat me, drink me, love me': The Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market 221Mary Wilson Carpenter13 Browning's Corpses 243Carol T Christ14 A E Housman and 'the colour of his hair' 255Christopher Ricks15 Tennyson's 'Little Hamlet' 268David G Riede16 The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti 286Eric Griffiths17 Stirring 'a Dust of Figures': Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Love 316Angela Leighton18 'Love, let us be true to one another': Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough and 'our Aqueous Ages' 333Joseph Bristow19 'Poets and lovers evermore': The Poetry and Journals of Michael Field 358Chris White20 Swinburne at Work: The First Page of 'Anactoria' 380Timothy A J Burnett21 Naming and Not Naming: Tennyson and Mallarmé 390Mary Ann Caws and Gerhard JosephIndex 411