This book is a critical introduction to major English poetry of the nineteenth century with an analysis of the changes in subject matter, form, tone, and technique resulting from Romantic influences. A reexamination of Victorian poems, placed against a background of Romantic thought, structure, and method, includes most of the major works of Arnold and Tennyson, as well as selected poems of Browning. Professor Colville reveals particular adaptations of the Romantic heritage in the shaping of mental attitudes in these poets. He finds that Arnold used his romantic inheritance in a series of delicately balanced oppositions, or tensions, which eloquently express the agonizing stasis of his outlook; that Browning used the Romantic style crudely and badly in his subjective transcendental poetry, and could usually only be successful as a poet by turning to objective, external concerns—by taking his manifest self out of the poems. Only in Tennyson, after an early stage of intense and undigested Romantic imitation, is there a sustained and successful attempt to refine and discipline Romantic style and method to serve his own outlook and utterance.

This volume should be useful to students of nineteenth century English literature through the way in which it relates the major poets of the century to each other and the Romantics. The brief introductory reformulation for those approaching romantic poetry for the first time, with the focus on selected Romantic poems, indicates that the book is based on many years of thinking and reflection, together with a natural sympathy and understanding of the topic it treats. The book combines a humane and enthusiastic restatement of familiar ideas with some new (or hitherto underemphasized) suggestions about major Victorian poetry.