264. (Thomas Hardy)

To make some attempt at getting at what Hardy’s poems grasp, I’ll look at one of the most famous later … More

248. (James Thomson)

Among the reasons Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” can be enjoyed is that it is a second-rate poem that … More

227. (Alfred Lord Tennyson)

The Victorians, who were much taken with “progress,” were also, unsurprisingly, devoted to imagining its opposite: being left behind. In … More

141. (Robert Browning)

In most lyric poems of the nineteenth century, the pressure exerted on the language derive from the intense self-consciousness of … More

139. (Matthew Arnold)

Showing, earlier this week, some poems I’d written to a critic I admire and trust, I received back some critical … More

125. (Christina G. Rossetti)

Patience is the activity and end of Christina G. Rossetti’s poetry: patience for the time of God, for death, for … More

112. (Lewis Carroll)

“The shadow of an amputated limb”–I’ve thrown out that phrase as a description of queerness in literature: the amputated limb … More

107. (Algernon Charles Swinburne)

Though Wilde mocked his pronouncements of sexual deviance,  Swinburne quarried queer desire for a reinvention of the metaphysical tradition. Even … More

84. (William Wordsworth)

If the project of the humanities is the recovery of the past, then a part of that recovery must be … More

83. (William Barnes)

William Barnes, born in 1801, is a contemporary of Tennyson and Robert Browning, and among his four collections of poetry … More