Table of Contents

1. Introduction: A Poetics of Encounter; 2. Dialogue and the Idyll: Tennyson and Landor; 3. Performing Conversation: Swinburne and Robert Browning; 4. Projects of Animation: Coleridge and Clare; 5. Ecphrastic Questions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Michael Field; 6. Cruel Intimacies: Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy; Epilogue: Louise Glück's Secret Conversations.

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Conversing in Verse considers when and why poets turn to conversation to explore and expand the potential of poetry.

About the Author

Elizabeth Helsinger is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of English, Art History, and Visual Studies. She has twice chaired the Department of English and once chaired the Department of Visual Studies. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. In her long and multidisciplinary career she has published books including Poetry and the Thought of Song (2015), Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts (2008), Rural Scenes and National Representation (1997), and Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1982). She is co-author of The Woman Question: Britain and America, 1837-1883 (1983, 1987) and co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, and has served on the boards of Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Nineteenth-Century Prose.