"Cast in the shadow of the soldier-poets of the First World War, Victorian war poets have often been disparaged as armchair patriots. Challenging this long-standing assumption, this book considers the evolution of the figure of the armchair poet...
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Universität Konstanz, Kommunikations-, Informations-, Medienzentrum (KIM)
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"Cast in the shadow of the soldier-poets of the First World War, Victorian war poets have often been disparaged as armchair patriots. Challenging this long-standing assumption, this book considers the evolution of the figure of the armchair poet engaged with the Crimean campaign and unpacks the complexity of civilian poetic representations of war. By virtue of the medium of modern war reportage, the Crimean War (1854-56) witnessed the inauguration of civilian spectatorship of distant suffering, provoking a heated debate over the concept of the war poet and of the function of war poetry during moments of national crisis. Confronted with news of the suffering soldier caused by the government's mismanagement of war, the armchair poet sought ways of addressing the problem of pain and adversity from a distance, and engaging with the politics of war by composing lines of verse at home. This is the first book-length study to examine the predicaments and achievements of mid-Victorian war poets. It provides historically nuanced readings of how a diverse group of British poets-ranging from the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson to the highly-acclaimed female poet Louisa Stuart Costello-fought a literary war as they reworked the established traditions of war poetry and experimented with poetic forms in response to news of distant combat"--
