While presenting an overview of the key developments, features, and preoccupations of Victorian poetry, The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry has two additional aims: to argue that Victorian poetry was inseparable from the mass print culture within which it found an audience, and to reinterpret the “rhetoric” of Victorian poetry in this context. Rather than surveying major authors, the Introduction maps formal practices and a series of social debates within which poems, both canonical and lesser-known, jostled against, answered, and challenged each other for aesthetic and cultural pre-eminence. It is a less tidy, occasionally even more discordant, account of poetry than is found in some literary histories, but is meant to highlight the liveliness and vibrancy of poetry in its day and to suggest sources of its continuing appeal.

I customarily pair works to indicate the dialogues in which poems engaged and those they initiated for Victorian audiences. I also indicate when poems were first published in periodicals, a medium that George Saintsbury, the prominent late-Victorian critic and literary scholar, termed the defining genre of the age in A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896). The frequency with which this notation occurs in following pages underscores Victorian poetry's wide circulation among readers (which has sometimes been underestimated) and poetry's intersection with other print forms in the first mass-media era.