The Everyman Book of Victorian Verse, the Post-Romantics

Nourished by the macabre, the exotic and the aberrant, their art was practiced on what Browning called 'the dangerous edge of things'. Landscape and introspection characterize Tennyson. Browning's 'morbid anatomy' analyses the saints and psychopaths, lovers and traitors of his dramatic doubt. Clough grows brittle and sardonic in his loss, while Swinburne marks the moral and poetic revolution of a new generation. These philosophical attitudes are embodied in some of the most memorable and readable verse in the English language.