Customer Reviews

The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

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Penguin has brought out this new volume to replace George MacBeth's eccentric and useless volume in the Penguin Classics series. But Karlin's production is equally dismal. These books, though theoretically aimed at a non-specialist audience, seem actually constructed for the amusement of exclusively donnish readers. Many of the most powerful and important achievements in Victorian poetry are ignored by this volume. Among the missing are: "The Scholar-Gypsy," "The Triumph of Time," "The Defense of Guenevere," and "Wessex Heights." The Ring and the Book is entirely unrepresented as is Empedocles on Etna. At the same time the volume includes great lumps of unpoetic babble. Clough's dull prosings are allotted 40 pages by Karlin while D. G. Rossetti is ludicrously restricted to 6! The Arnold selection is hopelessly unrepresentative, but Karlin manages room for such waxwork poetry as the following: I can read of thee,and find out/How thou fliest fast or slow;/Of thee in the north and south too,/Of thy great moustachioed mouth too,/And thy Latin name also (from Mary Howitt, The Dor-Hawk). Or the reader can thrill to Thomas Miller's The Ant-Lion: Then get into the sand his head,/Give it a bite and he is dead. The Ant-Lion has, perhaps, had some say in the construction of this anthology.After the misfire of MacBeth's volume, I would have thought Penguin would have been careful to publish a volume that its potential readers would have welcomed. They won't welcome this.

For the non-expert in Victorian poetry there is a rich and varied selection. Not only the heart of Victorian poetry, that is Browning and Tennyson, but also those whose place is really before but lived in the period as Wordsworth and those whose place is after but had their beginnings there, as Yeats. There are many names and poems of those whose work is not much read today.
There is however also Meredith's full Sonnet sequence, and a considerable amount of Elizabeth Barret Browning, and Rossetti.
I conclude the review with favorite lines of mine from my favorite Victorian Poem, Tennyson's 'Ulysses'
"Thou much is taken/much abides/ And thou we are not that strength/which moved Heaven/That which we are we are/ One equal temper of heroic hearts/ Made weak by time and fate/But strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find/And not to yield.