Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-century Britain

Helsinger explores the crucial importance of song as an aspirational model for post-Romantic 19th-century poets from Tennyson and Emily Bronte to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rosetti, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburn, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She shows how these poets focused on verse texture or prosody in the largest sense--rhythm and meter but also rhyme and other kinds of sound or sight semblance--as a site of poetry's performative and cognitive work. In exploring the impact of verse's sound, sight, and touch on poetry's writers and readers, she says, they turned repeatedly to song for models. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Elizabeth K. Helsinger, author of Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, is John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of English, Art History, and Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.