Gift annuals were an important medium for the most significant poets of the 1820s, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. That the annual overtakes the single-authored book as the dominant medium for poetry in the 1820s has been established, but the proliferation of poetry brought about by this new publishing format was often described in derogatory terms. The gift annual's decorative and luxurious appearance conflated it with the body of the middle-class woman on display in drawing rooms, and its association with women readers caused it to be regarded as lacking in seriousness. Much recent scholarship on gift annuals has demonstrated their importance and the sophistication of annual writers’ contribution to aesthetic and political questions of the 1820s and 1830s. However, the significance of the poetic experiments that take place in and through the annuals for Victorian poetry has not yet been fully acknowledged. The post-Romantic presence in Victorian poetry has tended to separate into twin strands of a male and female literary tradition and the significance of late Romantic woman poets is often confined to their influence on Victorian woman poets.

This gendered separation of post-Romantic influence may be in part responsible for the idea that the 1820s, a decade dominated by the success of women poets, is an ‘aesthetic lacuna’, a perspective that this book wholeheartedly challenges.It is a critical view that leaves annual poetry lingering on the margins of literary history, merely a localised phenomenon of the decade that has no bearing on later nineteenth-century poetry. In this chapter, I examine two aspects of annual poetry that I argue do, in fact, shape the course of Victorian poetics: first, the transmission of thought, feeling and sensation from poet to reader through a medium subject to commercial imperatives and mass audience demand; and second, the new temporalities the fast-paced publishing world imposed on poetry, disrupting ideas about fame, posterity and the present and future status of poetry, as well as the time frames of reading and memory.

Annual poets engaged with the relation between poet and reader through the dramas of reception in their poems, the multiple ironies created by the juxtaposition of engraved illustrations, poems and short stories, and by exploring the materiality of transmission through print media.