Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: A Guide Book

This study is the first to provide detailed and wide-ranging accounts of all of the varieties of long poem - epic, romance, verse-novel and sequences - published in the Romantic and Victorian periods. From famous works (The Prelude, In Memoriam, The Ring and the Book) to lesser-known marvels (Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants or Edward Lytton's King Poppy: a story without an end), this study provides a detailed book-by-book precis, relevant contextual information, biographical entries on authors and critical entries on the categories of long poem. A critical introduction examines why it was that the long poem was so central to Romantic and Victorian art and why 'epic' remains one of the weightiest modes of writing.