‘The Poetry of Married Life’ reflects on poetic descriptions of the quotidian reality of married life in the light of idealistic notions of ‘companionate marriage’ emerging from contemporary Socialist and Utopian thought and the prevalent sense of what Matthew Arnold called the ‘poetrylessness’ of modern life. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House begins by attempting to dignify the mundane events of married life, but finds, like the other poets whose work is examined in this chapter, that ‘[the] poetry of married life is almost invariably a poetry of postponement and evasion’. The result, in the work of Patmore and others, is a poetry which combines a typically Victorian focus on what Robert Browning calls the ‘moment, one and infinite’ in which the meaning and value of life are revealed with an equally characteristic search for forms capable of embodying the poets’ continual reflection on and reassessment of experience.

This chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence oThis chapter considers William Morris’s first collection of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). It starts by observing that the features of the collection given a difficult early reception by critics also ensured its popularity in the twentieth century. The chapter goes on to discuss Robert Browning’s influence on Morris and sets his manner of experimentation in the context of Pre-Raphaelite and medievalist aesthetics. Close attention is given to key poems from the collection, including ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’. f Guenevere’ and ‘The Haystack in the Floods’.

Just as singing was the foundation of Amy Beach’s musical world, songs formed the backbone for her composing. It was through songwriting that she won her initial fame as a composer, and for which she was best remembered for decades after her death. She composed songs prolifically throughout her career, producing 121 art songs. They predominate her total compositional output, often serving as a proving ground for larger works. They demonstrate her intimacy with the texts she chose to set, mastery of the form, and awareness of trends in current European musical styles. Insightful interpretation of poetic material and a keen awareness of languages’ natural inflections led to creation of melodies that flow as easily as the spoken word. This characteristic sets her songs apart from those of her peers and makes her songs accessible to both amateur and professional musicians. Recent rediscovery of Beach’s songs is due in large part to copyright expirations, making the majority of her songs readily available on the internet.

The Epilogue moves forward to consider briefly selected poems from the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and especially Louise Glück, who in her Nobel prize acceptance speech in December 2020 invoked an earlier tradition of poems that seem to invite the reader into secret conversations. These conversations are not, in fact, so secret, as Conversing in Verse has argued. The poems Glück cites (by Blake, Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot) include voices conversing under difficult conditions – as do her own poems, particularly in two collections, The Wild Iris and Meadowlands. There, as in the poetry that has been the subject of this study, misunderstandings and failed encounters are as frequent as successful ones. Handled with Glück’s ironic, witty self-awareness, they too are desperate conversations – with other people, with an impatient God, or with the nonhuman phenomena of the world. Poetry is after all sociable; it continues, against all odds, to converse.

Chapter 3, like Chapter 2, discusses poetry where conversation is both a represented and an experiential event – but as a represented event, one marked by swerves, interruptions, and misprisions such as those Blanchot believed essential to honor the otherness of others. Performing conversation in print, Swinburne and Browning drew on the long dramatic speeches, the formal stichomythic exchanges, and the dialogues between communal chorus and heroic characters that both admired in classical Greek tragedy. The chapter argues that the verse dramas and dramatic monologues of the later poets attempted a reparative political work under conditions of conversational asymmetry. For both Swinburne and Browning, as later for Levinas and Blanchot, the often missed exchanges of dramatic speech, especially in its tense relations with lyric or choral song, offered a site where readers not only study but also experience the difficulty of meaningful exchanges with the autonomous, enigmatic, but also authoritative otherness of the human and non-human world.

Chapter 5 considers texts in which music acts upon queer bodies to subject them to temporal flux or dislocation. Reading such texts through the lens of both Victorian evolutionary accounts of music’s origins and contemporary theory’s concern with ‘queer temporalities’ makes it possible to better articulate the tropes of backwardness and retrogression that attach to those queer desires awakened by music. In Browning’s ‘Charles Avison’ music’s association with both the evolutionary primitive and sexually abject presents a challenge to the teleological impetus underpinning Victorian ideals of progressive time. Similar motifs also emerge with particular prominence in stories relating to the figure of Pan by Machen, Forster and Benson. Here, the music of Pan unleashes queer desires that act upon bodies to subject them to the reverse flow of evolutionary time. In Forster’s text, Pan’s queerness is also made evident in the narrator’s paranoid fixation with masturbation, revealed in the text’s obsessive patterning of images invoking tactile contact. For Benson, Pan’s music leads his protagonist towards a queer sexual encounter that is simultaneously alluring and horrific.

‘Lord Byron is altogether in my affection again’, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett a few weeks before their elopement in 1846. During their courtship, Browning revised the more critical opinion of Byron which had followed his youthful discipleship, and was eager to show that he shared Elizabeth’s enthusiasm.

In 1889, the end of the decade in which all the major literary societies dedicated to poets were formed, Andrew Lang bemoaned their impact: ‘They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude and for their proper pleasure, men and women need confederates in this adventure.’ This shift in reading practices took place during an important decade for poetry. It was the decade during which some of the era’s most renowned poets died, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was the decade in which the relevance of poetry was increasingly questioned, as vernacular English literature was being claimed as having the capacity to be studied ‘scientifically’ like its sibling rival philology. It was also the decade that witnessed extended debate over the establishment of university Chairs of English Literature. In this context, this chapter examines the establishment and overwhelming popularity of literary societies in the 1880s, tracing their movement away from the ethos of a scholarly gentleman’s club towards more democratic, inclusive and experimental literary associations that tangibly impacted the reading of poetry in the 1880s.