This chapter argues that the concept of singularity is particularly helpful in examining what is distinctive about the reader's or listener's experience of a poem of literary quality. The chapter compares singularity to comparable concepts, such as difference, uniqueness, and originality, and it argues that singularity has two especially important features: a relation to generality and a relation to the event. This means that singularity is something that happens, something that the reader or listener experiences, rather than an unchanging object independent of readers and listeners. As something that happens, the singularity of a poem may work with, as well as against, conventions shared by other poems. Treating examples by Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, and others, the chapter concludes that a singular poem is singular precisely through its arrangement of poetic conventions, shared social discourses, and general linguistic codes.

This chapter follows a cue from Jacques Lacan in considering the antinomy of nonsense and onomatopoeia. With Edward Lear at its centre, the chapter discusses the violence against the animal and the species melancholy that characterize nonsense writing. Also treated are Christine Rossetti’s Sing-Song and animal poems by Thomas Hardy.

This chapter is the first of two on blood as a figure for kinship and species identity in the nineteenth century. It begins with the history of bloodletting and blood transfusion in the period, and documents the emergence in the second half of the century of an imaginary species body, whose individual members are characterized by their propensity to save or waste blood from the common supply. The idea of a collective body sharing a common blood is traced in a series of texts on bloodshed and blushing, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” William Morris’s “The Defense of Guinevere,” Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

This chapter examines 1890s women poets through the lens of ecology. By focusing on three main parameters (countryside, city, and empire), the chapter offers a new landscape of poets and poetries of the 1890s and argues that some of the most advanced ecological thinking of the period appeared in women’s poetry. Starting with Christina Rossetti, the chapter unveils how poets of the 1890s used genres such as the pastoral, realist, and symbolist poetry paradigmatically to produce powerful critiques of agrilogistics, globalization and eco-colonialism at the fin de siècle. Central to the chapter is its focus on polluted environments. Looking at Amy Levy and Alice Meynell, it shows how their poetics of soot and grime argued for green spaces to combat the damaged caused by the coal industry to modern city living. The chapter also analyzes the anticolonial poetics of Katharine Tynan and Sarojini Naidu and their use of autochthonous plants in their fight against the British empire.

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 3 analyzes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations alongside a formal analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) to draw further attention to the creative and communal processes associated with intertextual collaborative production. Reading this collaboration through the lens of sympathetic collaboration allows for an understanding of fellow-feeling dependent on the articulation of both individual and communal viewpoints – acknowledging difference – and the means of self-assimilation to form community. Reading Goblin Market as a collaborative lyric establishes how the poem constructs a reproduction of the Rossetti collaboration and underscores the interrelationships between word and image and community development. Placing the poem alongside the reformative work Christina Rossetti completed at Highgate Penitentiary, this chapter provides a direct contextual link to sympathetic concord and its inflection of moral reform. Reading the Rossettis’ contemporaneous literary productions as sympathetic collaborations that inform one another reveals, more broadly, the interlacings of shared experiences and literary and artistic productions within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.