British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century
by Beverley Rilett
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A Selection including Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats ...
A Selection including Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge.
British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century was created specifically for a university English course that introduces students to influential texts of nineteenth-century British literature. While there are suitable anthologies available, they are either inconveniently divided into separate volumes for “Romantic” and “Victorian” poets, or far more comprehensive (and expensive) than necessary for the relatively short span of time my students study the poetry of the period. Furthermore, though these poems have long been in the public domain and are readily available online, having a common print text to refer to during our class discussions of the works is more efficient. For these reasons, I decided to curate my own edition of representative poets and poetry of the long nineteenth century.
Scholars usually refer to the “long” nineteenth century because the significant literary movements of the period do not correspond neatly with the beginning and ending of the 1800s. The Romantic Movement in British poetry is usually said to begin either with Charlotte Smith or William Blake in the late 1700s. Similarly, late Victorian authors such as Oscar Wilde, whose work ushered in modernist aesthetics, continued to publish into the early 1900s. The title of this anthology is an attempt to more accurately categorize the poets I believe should be part of a course in nineteenth-century British literature.
In any collection, an editor must make choices about what to keep and what to leave out. My students and I debate these selections, sometimes vigorously. We ultimately cut some excellent poems in an attempt to balance, more or less, the number of pages devoted to each poet. Limiting our number of different authors to eighteen also allows an average class of students to pair up or work individually to introduce each one, which is a teaching strategy I have found effective. The poet’s gender was another important factor in our selection process, and we included several women poets who are often overlooked in nineteenth century studies. Furthermore, readers may be surprised to see the poetry of some British authors whose fiction usually garners more recognition than their verse. Many of these poems, however, are among my own and my students’ favorites.
Several exceptional features of this anthology make it a useful classroom text, such as the addition of line numbers to all the poems. By numbering every fifth line, we balanced the need for simple referencing with the need to reduce clutter on the designed page. Each poet’s section also opens with a brief biographical sketch and an image of the poet from the public domain—a taste that may cultivate the desire to learn more about the person behind the poetry.
After surveying what other professors are teaching in comparable courses; revisiting what I was taught as an undergraduate; poring through the anthologies available for adoption; and taking into consideration my own and my students’ intellectual and emotional responses, I created this edition of British poetry from the long nineteenth century. I am eager to use it with my future students and if you teach a similar unit or course, I hope you will consider using it too. Enjoy!
