British literature of the Victorian period has always been celebrated for the quality, innovativeness, and sheer profusion of its love poetry. Every major Victorian poet produced notable poems about love. This includes not only canonical figures, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, but also lesser-known poets whose works have only recently become widely recognized and studied, such as Augusta Webster and the many often anonymous working-class poets whose verses filled the pages of popular periodicals. Modern critics have claimed, convincingly, that love poetry is not just one strain of Victorian poetry among many; it is arguably its representative, even definitive, mode. This collection of essays reconsiders the Victorian poetry of love and, just as importantly, of intimacy-a more inclusive term that comprehends not only romance but love for family, for God, for animals, and for language itself. Together the essays seek to define a poetics of intimacy that arose during the Victorian period and that continues today, a set of poetic structures and strategies by which poets can represent and encode feelings of love. There exist many studies of intimate relations (especially marriage) in Victorian novels. But although poetry rivals the novel in the depth and diversity of its treatment of love, marriage, and intimacy, that aspect of Victorian verse has remained underexamined. Love among the Poets offers an expansive critical overview. With its slate of distinguished contributors, including scholars from the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia, the volume is a wide-ranging account of this vital era of poetry and of its importance for the way we continue to write, love, and live today.
Pearl Chaozon Bauer is an upper school English teacher at the Nueva School, where she teaches courses on postcolonial and decolonial thought and Victorian seriality. She is founding developer of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, a peer-reviewed digital humanities project that reimagines how to teach Victorian studies through a positive, race-conscious lens. Her current book project, Cosmology of the Circle, explores how to transform the classroom into a radically democratic, critical, and relational space of creative learning. Erik Gray is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on poetry, particularly British poetry of the nineteenth century. His books include The Art of Love Poetry, a transhistorical study of the relationship between poetry and love in the Western tradition.
Acknowledgments Introduction Counting the Ways of Love in Victorian Poetry Erik Gray and Pearl Chaozon Bauer I. Dualities Christina Rossetti's Echoes Eros and the Victorian Double Poem Stephanie L. Johnson The Revival of Courtly Love, 1850-1870 Allegory, Anachronism, and Violence Matthew Rowlinson Love Charms Herbert F. Tucker The Erotics of Sprung Rhythm Erik Gray II. Courtship and Marriage Love on the Factory Floor Working-Class Poets and Factory Courtship Verse Kirstie Blair "All on the Threshold" Christina Rossetti's Revisionary Epithalamia Pearl Chaozon Bauer The Mathematics of Marriage Augusta Webster's Combinatory and Fractional Intimacy Amy Kahrmann Huseby III. Beyond Erotic Intimacy Intimacy and the Neologistic Imagination in Hardy and Hopkins Veronica Alfano The Secret History of the Sonnet The Poetics of Maternal Love in Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter Josie Billington The Poetics of Cross-Species Love Julia F. Saville Yeats's Intimacies Francis O'Gorman Contributors Index
This beautiful book offers a much-needed return to one of the most essential literary genres, showing the many, varied, and often surprising ways in which intimate relations constituted and were constituted through Victorian poetry. Offering innovative and original perspectives, it transforms our sense of a field we thought we already knew. - Marion Thain, King's College London
