Introduction.- Chapter One: Workplace Verse: Poetry, Performance and the Industrial Worker.- Chapter Two: Sonnet Contests and Poetic Parlor Games.- Chapter Three: Christina Rossetti's Verses.- Chapter Four: Anti-Elitist Elitist Verse Forms: Comic Ballades and Rondeaus in Punch and Fun.- Chapter Five: “Of china that’s ancient and blue”: Andrew Lang and the Idea of Form”.- Chapter Six: Victorian Verse on the Colonial Frontier: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Versification of Settler Colonial Culture in Australia.- Chapter Seven: William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling.- Chapter Eight: Decisions and Revisions and Revolutions: History as Verse in Thomas Carlyle.- Chapter Nine: Commemorating the 1834 Parliament Fire in Satirical and Somber Verse.- Chapter Ten: Rossetti in the Nursery: The Speaking Silences of Sing-Song.- Chapter Eleven: Playing Along: The Verse in Victorian Poetry.

“This exhilarating collection opens up crucial glimpses into the widely and even wildly disparate historical and theoretical practices of Victorian poetic studies in our time. With its revelatory showcasing of the forms and forces of “mere verse,” this is a volume to relish and debate."—Tricia Lootens, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English emerita, University of Georgia“This wonderful volume gives us a new way to comprehend Victorian poetry. Specifically, it expands the field of Victorian poetry studies by reminding us of the period’s rich terrain of verse forms… The Introduction clearly and elegantly lays out the issues -- and it is a pleasure to read, as are the individual essays collected here, written by many of the greatest critics of Victorian poetry writing today." —Carolyn Williams, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University  “While Victorian Verse addresses major poets, particularly Christina Rossetti, it also shows how verse punctuated factory life, occupied physical space, filled periodicals, and wove into worship.…[This book] successfully gives readers a stirring new sense of a heretofore underestimated genre, and anyone who cares about Victorian daily life will find revelatory ideas in this collection.” — Talia Schaffer, Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life casts new light on nineteenth-century poetry by examining its popular verse forms and their surrounding social and media landscape. The volume offers insight into two central concepts of both the Victorian era and our own—status and taste—and how cultural hierarchies then and now were constructed and broken. By recovering the lost diversity of Victorian verse, this collection maps the breadth of Victorian writing and reading practices, illustrating how seemingly minor verse genres actually performed crucial social functions for Victorians, in education, leisure practices, the cultural production of class, and the formation of individual and communal identities. In addition to exploring lesser-known and even anonymous versifiers, the essays consider how “major” Victorian poets were also committed to writing and reading “minor” verse. Lee Behlman is Associate Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Montclair State University. Olivia Loksing Moy is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York, Lehman College.

“This wonderful volume gives us a new way to comprehend Victorian poetry. Specifically, it expands the field of Victorian poetry studies by reminding us of the period’s rich terrain of verse forms, their genres, their places of publication or circulation, their readers, singers, and reciters, and their social uses for edification, devotion, or simply just for fun. The volume ‘repeoples’ the world of Victorian poetry by imagining poetic address to historically concrete and situated audiences, and thus it offers us a ‘lived poetics’ that includes the nursery, the parlor, and the workplace as well as venues of print publication. The distinction between verse and poetry will provoke debate – and that debate is also represented in this volume – but it is of great importance to take account of the ubiquity of verse, embedded everywhere in the everyday life of the Victorians. Thus, this project is both necessary and welcome. The Introduction clearly and elegantly lays out the issues -- and itis a pleasure to read, as are the individual essays collected here, written by many of the greatest critics of Victorian poetry writing today.” (Carolyn Williams, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University)“From the ‘serial rhythms’ of periodical ‘filler poems’ to the ‘measures and immeasures’ of Thomas Carlyle’s historiography; from the generic strains of ‘anti-elitist elitist’ Punch parodies and English Parnassian ballades to the distinct, highly charged poetic composition and circulation histories of industrial workplace writing, hymns, and parlor-game sonnets; from long-canonical authors reconceived (Christina Rossetti as a poet of rhymes, silences, and motherhood, of ‘contingent lyrics,’ and of sonnet-contest entries; Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold as canny practitioners of doggerel; William Barnes as pastoral and ‘pastor poet’), to emerging writers, reoriented (Eliza Hamilton Dunlop as Australian colonial elegist), this exhilarating collection opens up crucial glimpses into the widely and even wildly disparate historical and theoretical practices of Victorian poetic studies in our time. With its revelatory showcasing of the forms and forces of ‘mere verse,’ this is a volume to relish and debate.” (Tricia Lootens, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English emerita, University of Georgia)“While Victorian Verse addresses major poets, particularly Christina Rossetti, it also shows how verse punctuated factory life, occupied physical space, filled periodicals, and wove into worship. Verse offered aesthetic pleasure, performative play, and parodic delight, but also a way to mark moments of historical significance. It spoke to ordinary people across furniture, factories, churches, schools, magazines, and colonial and indigenous spaces. Victorian Verse: The Poetics of Everyday Life successfully gives readers a stirring new sense of a heretofore underestimated genre, and anyone who cares about Victoriandaily life will find revelatory ideas in this collection.” (Talia Schaffer, Professor of English, City University of New York, Queens College and Graduate Center)

Draws on working-class newspapers, public oratory, colonial newspapers, comic magazines, and Victorian parlor games Highlights recent critical trends in Victorian studies Emphasizes verse forms such as the ballad, elegy, Chartist and working-class poetry, and children’s poetry