Victorian Poets (Bloom's Modern Critical Views (Hardcover)) Hardcover – February 1, 2011

Amazon have offered a lively work in this fresh 2011 publication.No subject is off limits in the essays of the eight contributors and the essays are much more than a study of words - they are more a study of the personal lives and inner thoughts of the poets.Victorian poets deserve praise but they do not escape the sometimes frank and scathing comments from the eminent scolar, Harold Bloom and the eight contributors to this work of 200 pages. indeed it takes only 8 pages for Bloom to unleash some devastating comment on Tennyson and some unnamed scholars. For example, he writes on one Tennyson offering....There are still Tennyson scholars who can read this (poem), or say they can, but the indefensible badness (yes BADNESS!) of it all is plain enough. Nevertheless Bloom finds much to like about Tennyson but limits the praise by suggesting his work could have been even greater.The eight essays cannot be simply read as a novel in one sitting. The rewards come from quiet reading. Some will prompt reflection. Some of the essays reveal the personal lives of the poets. No poet is studied in isolation and the contributors stimulate us by suggesting the works of other writers and poets who seem to have influenced the target of their essay. In Gail Marshall's essay on Browning she suggests that the broader her reading, the greater was her indebtedness to her predecessors.Some essayists go further on their own personal level, and J Hillis Miller discloses introspection arising from some identification she experienced from an earlier study of some works of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.But it is contributing writer, Gail Marshall, who jolts us back well behind the Victorian era when she examines the relationship between the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the towering Shakespeare. The introduction of Shakespeare into this series would perhaps have appealed to editor Harold Bloom who sees Shakespeare in a wonderous light. Elsewhere Bloom wrote that if he could question any dead author, he would choose Shakespeare who he regarded as a Genius.Elizabeth Barrett Browning was not alone in feeling the influence of Shakespeare. Many other writers, for example Milton,could provide similar testimony.We need not see these essays as a remote study of words; on the contrary, Gail Marshall notes, from private correspondence, the influence of Shakespeare in the way EE Browning used language to close friends and her lover, Robert Browning. Nothing is off limits in the examination of these Victorian Poets.The first essay, by Dorothy Mermin, confronts difficulties faced by Victorian women poets, suggesting that the following essays would not restrict themselves to stark analysis but would venture into the more heated arena of private lives. Writer Gail Marshall clearly delved into the love letters and private correspondence of Elizabeth Barret Browning in matching them with her poems.Take this book and delve into the lives of the Victorian Poets.Richard GlenisterBA (hons)La Trobe UniversityMelbourne