In the years covered by this volume high Victorian poetry reached it's prolific peak and stimulated a corresponding abundance of critical comment. As poets turned to new themes and new modes of presenting them, critics sought to redifine the function of poetry in their time and nowhere with greater immediacy and sense of the cultural issues at stake than in the periodicals. Two occasions when discussion was particularly lively - in relation to Tennyson's early poems and Arnold's 1853 Preface - are here used by Dr. Armstrong as focal points and with them in mind she has selected and annotated t