Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.

Morris the designer and maker is Morris the poet and Morris the socialist, for reasons that take us to the heart of his ambitions for the decorative arts and the nature of his practice. His work in the visual and tactile arts of decoration and design takes as its larger subject the workings of a desire for beauty in an often unlovely world shaped by the industrial revolution and driven by an optimistic capitalism. The designs he contributed to the furnishings business he created with his artist friends, Morris & Company, balanced harmonious colour and ordered structure against a complexity that invited the imagination to wander. His designs were intended to function therapeutically, addressing distortions of perception and sensibility produced by the conditions of modern labour and the effects of modern mass-produced objects on workers and consumers. Morris was frequently disappointed in his efforts to create an art for all, both by the economic exigencies of running a commercial business and by the decorative preferences of his clients. Yet in his designs for walls – wallpapers and textiles – he created an art of the domestic and the everyday, an art to live with that refused to abandon hope for a different future.

Chapter 1 starts from conversation’s intimate verbal connection with verse. Conversation – a mode of social care for Victorians – inscribes not only persons but also other beings and things in figures turning together, creating a verbal way of keeping company with others that many nineteenth-century poets explored through the virtual medium of verse. Lyric written with conversation in mind is sociable, as Empson and Adorno both claimed. To create conversation in modern verse requires eliciting voice from text: both figuring voice and configuring it by prosodic means, in David Nowell Smith’s useful account, encouraging an experience of reading that expands the sense of a single, individual voice to accommodate unlike others. Conversing in verse is a way of redesigning social space, at least in a poem. The chapter turns, in its final third, to the considerable body of twentieth-century philosophical writing addressing the ethical and political importance of conversation, especially the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot as they respond to the poetry of Paul Celan.

Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.

Chapter 2 focuses on the idylls of Tennyson and Landor as they explored in verse the conversations of friendship, responding to the difficulties of social relations with other beings by figuring and configuring voices other than themselves to put them – and their readers -- in dialogue with one another. Romantic and Victorian poets turned to the example of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, whose poetic fictions of conversation and song helped the later poets to imagine something like a Levinasian ethical social order amid political disorder. Following Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson’s English Idyls and Landor’s Hellenic Idylls took up the ethical and political challenges of conversing across deepening divisions they perceived around them, not only between persons but also between persons and the non-human natural world. Implicit in their efforts is an optimism that later poets, not least an older Tennyson, would find difficult to sustain.

The Epilogue moves forward to consider briefly selected poems from the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and especially Louise Glück, who in her Nobel prize acceptance speech in December 2020 invoked an earlier tradition of poems that seem to invite the reader into secret conversations. These conversations are not, in fact, so secret, as Conversing in Verse has argued. The poems Glück cites (by Blake, Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot) include voices conversing under difficult conditions – as do her own poems, particularly in two collections, The Wild Iris and Meadowlands. There, as in the poetry that has been the subject of this study, misunderstandings and failed encounters are as frequent as successful ones. Handled with Glück’s ironic, witty self-awareness, they too are desperate conversations – with other people, with an impatient God, or with the nonhuman phenomena of the world. Poetry is after all sociable; it continues, against all odds, to converse.

Chapter 3, like Chapter 2, discusses poetry where conversation is both a represented and an experiential event – but as a represented event, one marked by swerves, interruptions, and misprisions such as those Blanchot believed essential to honor the otherness of others. Performing conversation in print, Swinburne and Browning drew on the long dramatic speeches, the formal stichomythic exchanges, and the dialogues between communal chorus and heroic characters that both admired in classical Greek tragedy. The chapter argues that the verse dramas and dramatic monologues of the later poets attempted a reparative political work under conditions of conversational asymmetry. For both Swinburne and Browning, as later for Levinas and Blanchot, the often missed exchanges of dramatic speech, especially in its tense relations with lyric or choral song, offered a site where readers not only study but also experience the difficulty of meaningful exchanges with the autonomous, enigmatic, but also authoritative otherness of the human and non-human world.

Chapter 4 takes personification as its point of departure in the wake of Wordsworth’s well-known dismissal of it. From this perspective, Coleridge’s early conversation poems – where a tenuous reciprocity with the natural world is with difficulty achieved through the unfolding artifice of the poem – and Clare’s recreations in verse of remembered conversations with self-personifying natural things are inventive extensions of eighteenth-century methods for putting human beings into social converse with the natural world. Both, the chapter argues, are instances of what Jonathan Culler calls “projects of animation”: poems where more subtle practices of personification support a poetry that reaches out to a chattering world of non-human beings and things to make them talk not only to each other but also, at least in poetry, to us. Such tactics seemed altogether more possible, however, early in the century than toward its close – as the poetry of Swinburne’s French correspondents, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes clear.

Derived from the Greek aesthesis, for English-speakers at the beginning of Victoria’s reign ‘aesthetics’ was a largely technical, not yet anglicized term for ‘the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception’. First used in 1750 by Alexander Baumgarten in something like the modern sense (‘the philosophy or theory of taste, or of the beautiful in nature and art’, OED), ‘aesthetik’ was embraced by both Schiller and Hegel. Coleridge attempted unsuccessfully to introduce it into English as an unfamiliar but useful term to designate a convergence of form, feeling, and intellect, but it was not widely adopted to denote the study of beauty in nature or the visual arts until the 1850s, and was not common in discussions of literature or music before the 1870s. The term’s slow anglicization was due in part to its association with German metaphysicians regarded, in Britain, with suspicion. The work of the systematic German philosophers (Kant and Hegel) and their interest in the place of aesthetic pleasure in a theory of mind had few serious students in Britain between Coleridge and Pater. By 1875, James Sully, author of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s first entry on aesthetics, gives due place to Kant, Hegel, and other German philosophers.

Most Victorian aesthetic speculation took place not through formal philosophical investigation but through literature and criticism. It was driven by the need to make sense of a perceived abundance of art and literature (from both past and present) and to defend the arts under conditions felt as increasingly hostile: industrialization, worship of the ‘Goddess of Getting On’, and dependence on a market of under-educated middle and aspiring-middle classes.