[Matthew Campbell] Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)(pdf){Zzzzz}[BЯ]

In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, first published in 1999, Matthew Campbell explores the work of four Victorian poets - Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy - as they show a consistent and innovative concern with questions of human agency and will. The Victorians saw the virtues attendant upon a strong will as central to themselves and to their culture, and Victorian poetry strove to find an aesthetic form to represent this sense of the human will. Through close study of the metre, rhyme and rhythm of a wide range of poems - including monologue, lyric and elegy - Campbell reveals how closely technical questions of poetics are related, in the work of these poets, to issues of psychology, ethics and social change. He goes on to discuss more general questions of poetics, and the implications of the achievement of the Victorian poets in a wider context, from Milton through Romanticism and into contemporary critical debate.

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Review
'… combines alert prosodic analysis with thematic commentary, providing some of the most interesting close reading of Victorian poetry since Herbert Tucker's Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism.' Choice

'… Rhythm and Will is essentially an innovative study, and that Campbell is operating ahead of much of the field.' Peter McDonald, Notes and Queries

'… a book that scrupulously heeds what Victorian poets actually said, and how they said it'. Victorian Poetry

'… a lively and critically intelligent book.' The Review of English Studies

'… a brilliant study … is a courageously independent-minded work of scholarship which thereby possesses an originality and integrity increasingly rare in contemporary criticism.' Tennyson Research Newsletter
Book Description
This 1999 book explores the work of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy in the context of their concern with questions of human agency and will, and discusses more general questions of poetics. His book makes a major contribution to the current renewal of interest in formalist readings of poetry.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (22 April 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521642957
ISBN-13: 978-0521642958