Like the Romantic poets before them, the Victorian poets saw themselves as game changers. They were the people who would bring about modernity, not just describe it. This spring semester, we’re going to examine the works of the well known and less well known poets of the period to get a sense of the direction in which this literary genre was moving during the period but also to get a sense of the breadth of their interests, concerns, and talents. So, we’ll read Tennyson and the Brownings, but we’ll also explore the poems of Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte—writers we are accustomed to think of only as novelists.