Conversing in Verse
Conversation in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry

Conversing in Verse considers when and why poets turn to conversation to explore and expand the potential of poetry.

Elizabeth Helsinger (Author)

9781009200202, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 August 2022

205 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.7 cm, 0.47 kg

Conversing in Verse considers poems of conversation from the late eighteenth into the twentieth centuries – the very period when a more restrictive conception of poetry as the lyric product of the poet's solitary self-communing became entrenched. With fresh insight, Elizabeth Helsinger addresses a range of questions at the core of conversational poetry: When and why do poets turn to conversation to explore poetry's potential? How do conversation's forms and intentions shape the figures, rhythms, and prosody of poems to alter the reader's experience? What are the ethical and political stakes of conversing in verse? Coleridge, Clare, Landor, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Michael Field, and Hardy each composed poems that open difficult or impossible conversations with phenomena outside themselves. Helsinger unearths an unfamiliar lyric history that produced some of the most interesting formal experiments of the nineteenth century, including its best known, the dramatic monologue.

1. Introduction: A Poetics of Encounter
2. Dialogue and the Idyll: Tennyson and Landor
3. Performing Conversation: Swinburne and Robert Browning
4. Projects of Animation: Coleridge and Clare
5. Ecphrastic Questions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Michael Field
6. Cruel Intimacies: Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy
Epilogue: Louise Glück's Secret Conversations.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Poetry [DC]