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The work emphasizes poetry’s capacity to ask more demanding, experimental questions than other genres, and outlines editorial and critical debts shaping its 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intertwined, often in arresting ways, with theology, science, philosophy, theories of language and politics. As cultural and intellectual change became progressively more apparent, two traditions of poetry developed, one exploring various strategies for democratic, radical writing, the other developing, in different forms, a conservative poetry. I have taken John Stuart Mill’s description of these two movements, ‘two systems of concentric circles’, as the title of my first chapter, though I do not think these circles met and merged quite as he would have liked them to, particularly if one remembers the workingclass and women poets who often worked outside these spheres. However, a study of these two great interacting circles discloses the immense sophistication and subtlety of Victorian poetry. It is a poetry, whether it belongs to democratic or conservative formations, which asks more demanding and radical questions of its culture than other genres of the period, experimenting with forms and poetic language commensurate with this complexity. The novel, with its need to gain the consent of a wide readership, could not afford such experiments. In reading the poets in this way I have excluded much material. But it seemed that this exploration would best reveal how the prolific creativity of these writers belongs recognisably to our own cultural situation and, conversely, exists in sharp separation from it. Victorian culture is our precursor culture, but, like the duck/ rabbit, with its mutually exclusive configurations, we find in it important affinities–and differences which are just as important. Victorian poetry was written, for instance, in a society which was not a democracy. On the other hand, that was what Arnold called one of its ‘modern problems’, and one of the excitements of reading the poetry of this period is to understand the imaginative energy invested in such ‘modern problems’. My study begins, of course, before Victoria came to the throne in 1837, because Tennyson and Browning identified‘modern problems’ in their early work of the 1830s.  \nBeyond the horizon of one book, like Pope’s mountain peaks, another usually appears, a prospect both pleasurable and daunting. While this book was being  \nviii  \ncompleted my work opened up possibilities for further research. Women’s poetry and working-class poetry by both men and women are capable of very much more extensive discussion. Anglophone poetry written in Britain’s colonial territories during the nineteenth century is technically ‘Victorian’ poetry, but it seemed appropriate that such work should be studied by scholars familiar with the history and culture of those regions.  \nVictorian texts are now being re-edited to the high standards of modern textual scholarship. Where I could not use such modern editions I have cited generally available texts. I was not able to take advantage of the Longman Annotated Texts edition of Browning by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin. Like many, however, I owe an enormous debt to Christopher Ricks’s great edition of Tennyson’s poetry in the Longman series, which has enabled scholars and critics to explore Tennyson with a depth and richness quite impossible before its appearance. I have benefited from the abundance of criticism of Victorian poetry which has appeared in the last decade. Lack of space has prevented me from referring to it in detail. But the importance of the pioneering work of Martha Vicinus on workingclass poetry and W. David Shaw’s explorations of Victorian epistemology should not go unmentioned.  \nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  \nI am grateful to Professor R. A. Foakes for asking me to write a critical history of Victorian poetry, and for his patience and encouragement while it was being written. The greater part of this book was completed while I held a Chair of English at the University of Southampton. I should like to thank Derek Attridge, Frank Stack, Maud Ellmann, R","cbCairBOP5JEatDk","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCairBOP5JEatDk","pdf",3562675,539,"English","# Preface\n# Acknowledgements\n# Introduction: Rereading Victorian Poetry\n## What Kind of History?","[{\"question\":\"What does the study say about the relationship between Victorian poetry and broader intellectual life?\",\"answer\":\"It holds that Victorian poetry and poetics were intertwined with theology, science, philosophy, theories of language, and politics, reflecting major cultural and intellectual changes.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the book distinguish between two traditions of Victorian poetry?\",\"answer\":\"It describes one tradition using strategies for democratic, radical writing and another developing, in different forms, a conservative poetry.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the author emphasize reading Victorian poetry differently from other genres of the period?\",\"answer\":\"Because poetry, in both democratic and conservative formations, asks more demanding and radical questions, experimenting with forms and poetic language suited to complexity that the novel could not sustain.\"}]","Victorian Poetry - Preface - Introduction Rereading Victorian Poetry | PDF",1789988031,830]