From Swinburne and William Morris to Kipling and Thomas Hardy.

          From the new generation in the 1860s, including Swinburne and William Morris, to the metropolitan literary scene of the 1890s, British poets were preoccupied with their literary heritage and their changing society. Rejecting convention, the bohemian Pre-Raphaelites look back to the art of Remaissance and medieval Europe for an ideal of beauty; Thomas Hardy powerfully evokes the losses of the modern world; Rudyard Kipling celebrates the Empire; Oscar Wilde recalls his imprisonment and exile.

          These poems of love, disillusionment, the innocence of childhood and the mixed price of Empire are the expression of their complex age.

          Including introduction, notes and a chronology of the poets and their times.