Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Liberal Thought

Anna Barton is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK.

• 1. Locke in Pentameters.- 2. The Liberal Self: Wordsworth and Barrett Browning.- 3. Liberal Education: Wordsworth, Clough, Tennyson and Arnold.- 4. Liberalism in Love: Barrett Browning, Browning and Meredith.- 5. Liberal Republicanism: Clough, Barrett Browning and Swinburne.- 6. Conclusion.

“Approach to liberalism constitutes at once the book’s main liability and its greatest strength. … nineteenth-century poets engaged with the progressive social thought of their day not only when they addressed it directly but in all their poems, even the most apparently private. Barton’s often revelatory new formalist analyses compellingly demonstrate the real intellectual work that poetry can perform.” (Erik Gray,The Review of English Studies, Vol. 70 (293), February, 2019)