The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry

This book examines the ways in which 19th-century English poets Tennyson, Browning, and Hopkins responded creatively to the ambiguities involved in writing down their own voices, the melodies of their speech. Asserting that intonation, accent, tempo, and pitch of utterance can be inferred from a written text but are not clearly demonstrated, Griffiths provides original readings of the poets' work. He also examines the major preoccupations of the period—immortality, morbidity, marriage, social divisions, and religious conversions—to offer a new analysis of Victorian Poetry.