Rhythm and Will in Victorian PoetryIn Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, first published in 1999, Matthew Campbell explores the work of four Victorian poets - Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy - as they show a consistent and innovative concern with questions of human agency and will. The Victorians saw the virtues attendant upon a strong will as central to themselves and to their culture, and Victorian poetry strove to find an aesthetic form to represent this sense of the human will. Through close study of the metre, rhyme and rhythm of a wide range of poems - including monologue, lyric and elegy - Campbell reveals how closely technical questions of poetics are related, in the work of these poets, to issues of psychology, ethics and social change. He goes on to discuss more general questions of poetics, and the implications of the achievement of the Victorian poets in a wider context, from Milton through Romanticism and into contemporary critical debate. |
Contents
| 1 | |
PART ONE Rhythms of will | 13 |
PART TWO Monologue and monodrama | 97 |
PART THREE Making a will | 155 |
Notes | 239 |
| 259 | |
| 269 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
active aesthetic agency anapaest Armstrong Arthur Hallam artist attempts Barrett beat body Browning Browning's Cambridge character Christopher Ricks Coleridge conception consciousness criticism dead death Dennis Taylor describes dramatic monologue drift echo effect elegy English Eric Griffiths Essays existence experience feeling final Gerard Manley Hopkins ghost gives Guido Hallam Tennyson Hardy's heart human iambic iambs imagined language Lippo London lyric Macmillan Mariana Maud meaning Memoriam metre metrical Milton mind mood move movement nature nineteenth-century objects Oxford University Press passage passion passive perception picture poem poem's poet poet's poetic Pompilia possible prosody reader reading rhyme rhythm rhythmic Robert Bridges says sonic Sordello soul sound speak speaker speech sprung rhythm stanza stress strives suggests syllables T. S. Eliot thee thing Thomas Hardy thought tion Ulysses verb Victorian Poetry voice W. B. Yeats word Wordsworth writing Yeats