Victorian Poetry articles

Recent articles from Victorian Poetry

Guest editor's foreword.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... Well--were it not a pleasant thing To fall asleep with all one's friends; To pass with all our social ties To silence from the paths of men; And every hundred years to rise And learn the world, and sleep again; To sleep through terms of mighty wars, ...

Unnumbered polypi.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... In August 1829, during a "voyage among the Polynesian islands," the surgeon George Bennett acquired a pearly (or chambered) nautilus (nautilus pompilius). This creature had been spotted "floating on the surface of the water... resembling, as the sailors on Bennett's ship put it, "a dead...

Tennyson and the ladies.(Alfred Tennyson)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... In his 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and 1832 Poems, Tennyson published more than a dozen lyrics now designated "lady poems"--taking his titles from the heroines of Shakespeare and Spenser, modern and classical authors, and letting them evolve, as he put it, "like the camel, from my own...

Getting it wrong in "The Lady of Shalott".(Critical essay)
March 22, 2009... Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses famously declares, "Video meliora proboque,/ deteriora sequor"--I see what is better, and I approve of it; I pursue what is worse. (1) The passage is justly celebrated, because it transforms what could be a simple commonplace--people do wrong, even when they know...

Tennyson and the embodied mind.(Alfred Tennyson)
March 22, 2009... Some time after the publication of his book The Principles of Psychology in 1855, Herbert Spencer wrote to Alfred Tennyson: SIR, I happened recently to be re-reading your Poem "The Two Voices," and coming to the verse Or if thro' lower lives I came- ...