Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain

In arguing for the crucial importance of song for poets in the long nineteenth century, Elizabeth Helsinger focuses on both the effects of song on lyric forms and the mythopoetics through which poets explored the affinities of poetry with song. While she considers poets long described as “musical""—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Brontë, and Algernon Charles Swinburne—she also examines the more surprising importanceof song for those poets who rethought poetry through the medium of visual art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti. Helsinger’s close readings incorporate the philosophical and scientific discourses prevalent at the time and today as they bear on the question of how poetry, like song, may be said to think.