Victorian Poetry and Modern Life ─ The Unpoetical Age

Today it goes without saying that any and all aspects of life are open to poets to write about. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the proper subject matter for poetry was a controversial question. Should poets turn to the more congenial, more heroic, more malleable past for their materials, leaving the field of the present clear for the upstart novel? Or was it their duty to tackle their own age, to reconcile its ugliness and chaos and banality with the beauty and order of poetry?

This first full-length study of an experimental, influential, and very diverse mid-Victorian school of poetry traces a number of family resemblances between long poems of the period that, combining elements of the novel and the epic to form new generic hybrids, each take up the gauntlet of representing 'unpoetical' modern, everyday life poetically.

Natasha Moore is Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, Australia. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held research fellowships at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Sydney, and the University of Delaware.