The Realms of Verse 1830-1870 English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building [Hardcover]

Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, and Clough lived and wrote in a time of nation-building. The Realms of Versebrings that political and intellectual context to life, and traces its influence on the narratives, language, and form of their poetry. Theoretically astute and historically detailed, this study is the most far-reaching reassessment of Victorian poetry to have been published in recent years.

Orientations
Poetry and its times
Poets and nations
Three types of unity
The inspiration of Italy
From elegy to prophecy
The scope of narrative:Aurora Leigh
Repulsive Clough
Browning's alien pages
Tennyson's Britain
Ever-broadening Britain
The empire of the imagiantion
The married state:Idylls of the King
Coda: After the realms of verse
Works cited
Index

Reynolds is an exceptionally incisive and lucid critic, keenly attentive to formal dynamics...but also deft in summarizing the distinctive political engagements of each poet.... This is an extremely important study, one of the best I know on the large ambitions of Victorian poetry. --James Eli Adams,Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

That'sRealms of Verse, notReams, don't worry--though among the many virtues of this broad-minded, sure-handed book is the extent of ground it commands. Matthew Reynolds provides substantial new readings of the major long poems of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, in welcome technical detail and in persuasive political context.... Reynolds sets a high standard for the new century's work in our area of literary studies. May he find able emulators soon. --Victorian Studies