Victorian Verse

Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining the period through its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were and are constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, the book maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how these seemingly minor verse genres actually possessed crucial social functions for Victorians, particularly in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. The essays consider how “major” Victorian poets, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse, further troubling the clear-cut notions of canonicity by examining the contradictions of value.

“This wonderful volume gives us a new way to comprehend Victorian poetry. Specifically, it expands the field of Victorian poetry studies by reminding us of the period’s rich terrain of verse forms, their genres, their places of publication or circulation, their readers, singers, and reciters, and their social uses for edification, devotion, or simply just for fun. The volume ‘repeoples’ the world of Victorian poetry by imagining poetic address to historically concrete and situated audiences, and thus it offers us a ‘lived poetics’ that includes the nursery, the parlor, and the workplace as well as venues of print publication. The distinction between verse and poetry will provoke debate – and that debate is also represented in this volume – but it is of great importance to take account of the ubiquity of verse, embedded everywhere in the everyday life of the Victorians. Thus, this project is both necessary and welcome. The Introduction clearly and elegantly lays out the issues -- and itis a pleasure to read, as are the individual essays collected here, written by many of the greatest critics of Victorian poetry writing today.” (Carolyn Williams, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University)

“From the ‘serial rhythms’ of periodical ‘filler poems’ to the ‘measures and immeasures’ of Thomas Carlyle’s historiography; from the generic strains of ‘anti-elitist elitist’ Punch parodies and English Parnassian ballades to the distinct, highly charged poetic composition and circulation histories of industrial workplace writing, hymns, and parlor-game sonnets; from long-canonical authors reconceived (Christina Rossetti as a poet of rhymes, silences, and motherhood, of ‘contingent lyrics,’ and of sonnet-contest entries; Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold as canny practitioners of doggerel; William Barnes as pastoral and ‘pastor poet’), to emerging writers, reoriented (Eliza Hamilton Dunlop as Australian colonial elegist), this exhilarating collection opens up crucial glimpses into the widely and even wildly disparate historical and theoretical practices of Victorian poetic studies in our time. With its revelatory showcasing of the forms and forces of ‘mere verse,’ this is a volume to relish and debate.” (Tricia Lootens, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English emerita, University of Georgia)

“While Victorian Verse addresses major poets, particularly Christina Rossetti, it also shows how verse punctuated factory life, occupied physical space, filled periodicals, and wove into worship. Verse offered aesthetic pleasure, performative play, and parodic delight, but also a way to mark moments of historical significance. It spoke to ordinary people across furniture, factories, churches, schools, magazines, and colonial and indigenous spaces. Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life successfully gives readers a stirring new sense of a heretofore underestimated genre, and anyone who cares about Victoriandaily life will find revelatory ideas in this collection.” (Talia Schaffer, Professor of English, City University of New York, Queens College and Graduate Center)

Lee Behlman is Associate Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Montclair State University. He co-edited the collection Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge 2016) with Anne Longmuir, and has published articles on Victorian classicism, nineteenth-century motherhood, and light verse in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. 


Olivia Loksing Moy is an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York, Lehman College. She is the author of The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry and has published widely on Romantic and Victorian poetry, the Gothic, and comparative and world literatures. With Marco Ramírez, she is co-editor and co-translator of Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats. Moy is director of The CUNY Rare Book Scholars and serves as a volume lead for the Michael Field Diaries Project.