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This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length-the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic-in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the mid-Victorian decades poets, like novelists, were embedded in political and formal networks. Many harnessed nationally inflected lyric forms to triangulate French and British exchanges with the marginalized perspective of Risorgimento Italy. An especially lively debate of the early 1870s concerned Louis Napoleon, in his third and final exile in Britain after his defeat by Prussia. For Robert Browning, who saw poetic forms like the dramatic monologue as means to animating ethical choices, the effects of Louis's actions on the French and Italian peoples demanded rigorous accounting. This Browning undertakes in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871), voicing civic-republican "soul-talk': poetry's feminized counterpart to the discourse of manly character. In doing so, Browning demonstrates his own immersion in overlapping republican and liberal political networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a critique of the 1839 epic poem "Ernest; or, Political Regeneration," by Capel Lofft. It comments on the goal of provoking a popular revolution, examining the contemporary context of Chartism in Great Britain. The author considers the text's literary value, the author's political radicalism, and hierarchical and egalitarian aspects of the poem.

The article offers criticism on the 1818 poem "The Revolt of Islam," by Percy Bysshe Shelley, previously titled "Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century." The author suggests that Shelley used chemistry theories from scientists Sir Humphry Davy and Adam Walker in composing the poem and discusses metamorphosis in the poem, focusing on the characters of Laon and Cythna.

The article offers criticism on the 1817 poem "The Lament of Tasso" by George Byron, focusing on the role of the biography of 16th-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso in English literature. The author discusses biographies of Tasso by authors including Henry Layng and Giovan Battista Manso and focuses on the depiction of Tasso's imprisonment and madness in Byron's poem and in works by other authors such as Henrietta Prescott and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The article offers criticism on the poem "Ode to Psyche," by John Keats. The author discusses secularism and criticism of Christianity in Keats's work and analyzes the work in relation to the idea of the "genealogy of the secular." Specific topics include the idea of orthodoxy in the poem, the idea of Cockney classicism, and Keats's poem "The Fall of Hyperion." Also discussed are botanical, classical Greek, and natural historical themes in the poem.

A literary criticism of the poems "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion," by the Romantic poet John Keats, is presented. The article discusses themes of "looking" and "seeing" in the poems as related to the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze. Other topics include the Romantic poet George Byron, post-Napoleonic war thinking and the defeat of Waterloo in Keats's poetry, Keats's political beliefs, and image and dream in Keats's poems.

The article presents criticism of the poems "Endymion" and "Sleep and Poetry" by the Romantic poet John Keats. The author discusses the event of beginning in Keats's poetry in relation to politics. Topics addressed include Romantic poets' lack of interest in politics, the idea of beginning writing poetry in Keats's poetry, and political aspects of Keats's poems.

The article presents criticism of the poem "Endymion," by the Romantic poet John Keats. The author discusses political aspects of Keats's poetry and explores themes of beauty and aesthetic politics in Keats's poetry. The author uses passages from "Endymion" relating to aesthetics and beauty and compares Keats to the poet William Wordsworth.

The article presents a poetry criticism of the poem "Don Juan" by George Gordon, Lord Byron. It notes that within the poem Byron takes on the persona of the Italian Improvvisatore tradition, which cultivates the impression of spontaneity and absence of hard work in writing poetry. The article points out, however, that rhyming in English is more difficult than in Italian and that although it seems carefree, Byron could not have managed rhyming for pages on end without working at it.