Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, and Clough lived and wrote in a time of 'nation-building'. The Realms of Verse brings this political and intellectual context to life, and traces its influence on the narratives, language, and form of their poetry. Theoretically astute and stylishly written, the book will be essential reading for scholars, students, and anyone interested in Victorian literature.

• I. Orientations


• 1: Poetry and its Times


• 2: Poets and Nations


• 3: Three Types of Unity


• II. The Inspiration of Italy


• 4: From Elegy to Prophecy


• 5: The Scope of Narrative: Aurora Leigh


• 6: Repulsive Clough


• 7: Browning's Alien Pages


• III. Tennyson's Britain


• 8: Ever-Broadening Britain


• 9: The Empire of the Imagiantion


• The Married State: Idylls of the King


• +Coda: After the Realms of Verse

Matthew Reynolds is a Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne's College, Oxford.