The Heart's Events The Victorian Poetry of Relationships [Hardcover]

Dr Ball offers an analysis and evaluation of a number of Victorian long poems and groups of lyrics which trace the course of close personal relationships. Her argument is that whereas Romantic treatment of such material was limited, the Victorian poets not only made this emotional territory their own but explored it with vigour, variety and enterprise, and great technical resource. This is apparent, as Dr Ball shows, whether the poets concern themselves with crises such as loss through death In Memoriam, Patmore's odes of bereavement  or breakdown Modern Love, Maud, James Lee's Wife or whether they portray the intricate flux of mutual attraction and courtship, as inAmours de Voyage,The Bothie of Tober-na-VuolichandThe Angel in the House.The Heart's Eventsbrings out strongly the experimental vitality and range of Victorian poetry and, in particular, its sensitive imaginative response to the subtleties of psychological time and change in its records of the inner histories of love.

Patricia M. Ball was Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. She is the author of The Central Self and The Science of Aspects.

Introduction: Let us be true to one another'
I. The Difference to Me'
Wordsworth: the Lucy Poems;
Byron: Poems of the Separation
II. The Fates, It Is Clear, Are Against Us'
Arnold: the Marguerite Poems;
Clough:Amours de Voyage
III. Till All My Widowed Race Be Run'
Patmore: Odes of Bereavement;
Tennyson:In Memoriam
IV. If I Be Dear to Someone Else'
Meredith:Modern Love; Tennyson:Maud;
Browning:James Lee's Wife
V. To Marry Her and Take Her Home'
Clough:The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich;
Patmore:The Angel in the House
Conclusion: The Heart's Events
Index