Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry

This 1999 book explores concepts of human will in the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy.

Matthew Campbell (Author)

9780521642958, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 April 1999

290 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.6 kg

'… a brilliant study … is a courageously independent-minded work of scholarship which thereby possesses an originality and integrity increasingly rare in contemporary criticism.' Tennyson Research Newsletter

In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, first published in 1999, 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.

1. Two decisions
Part I. Rhythm and Will: 2. 'Will' and rhythm
3. Tennyson, Browning and the absorbing soul
Part II. Monologue and Monodrama: 4. Browning and the element of action
5. 'Tis well that I should bluster': Tennyson's monologues
Part III. Making a Will: 6. The drift of In Memoriam
7. Incarnating elegy in The Wreck of the Deutschland
8. The mere continuator: Thomas Hardy and the end of elegy.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]