These two volumes list late-and mid-Victorian poets, with brief biographical information and bibliographical details of published works. The major strength of the works is the 'discovery' of very many minor poets and their work, unrecorded elsewhere.

The first collection to make a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century women's poetry from late Romantic to late Victorian 'new woman' writers. Eighteen essays consider the gendered codes and genres developed by sophisticated poets. The feminine subject and marketing, a woman's tradition, lesbian desire, war, race, colonial experience, religion and science are themes of the collection, featuring, as well as the familiar Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, other poets such as 'L.E.L.', Felicia Hemans, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster.

'Deeply unpoetical' was how Matthew Arnold described the Victorian period; and many of his contemporaries would have agreed. Even to later generations poetic achievement from 1830 to 1890 seems dwarfed by the great burgeoning of the novel.However, English Poetry of the Victorian Period demonstrates the very real diversity and richness of Victorian poetry. This was the era of Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, Swinburne, Clough, the Rossettis and Hopkins - poets who not only wrote with distinctly original voices, but who also reflected the deeper tensions of their time. Bernard Richards balances detailed analysis of individual poets and works with a broader perspective of the poetic spirit of the age. Two new chapters have been added to this revised edition, on nonsense poetry and women poets. He characterises the Victorian age as one of tremendous poetic wealth, related to but different from the Romantic period which preceded it and the Modernist period which followed it.

Contains 4000 entries listing the published works of late Victorian poets (1880-1899). Arranged alphabetically by author, the work includes biographical information, bibliographical details of published works and cross-references to other names. It lists many minor poets unrecorded elsewhere.