This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and contemporary contexts.

Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings of a number of well-known poems

Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems

Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns

Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological context

Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body, and melancholy

Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of Victorian poetry

Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems

Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and postmodernism