Rhythm And Will In Victorian Poetry

This page intentionally left blank In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, 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. Matthew Campbell is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, and co-editor of Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics (). He has published articles in Essays in Criticism, English, Tennyson Research Bulletin, Bulla´n and the European Journal of English Studies. MMMMMM    -      RHYT HM AND WILL IN VICTORIAN POETRY CA MB RIDG E ST UD IES IN N I NE T EE N T H -C E N T U RY L I T E RA TUR E A ND CU L TUR E General editor Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London Terry Eagleton, University of Oxford Leonore Davidoff, University of Essex Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley D. A. Miller, Columbia University J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Mary Poovey, New York University Elaine Showalter, Princeton University Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous scholarly syntheses and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as ‘background’, feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book. RHYT HM AND WILL IN VI CT ORI AN POETRY M A TT H E W C A MP B E L L        