Eliot, George - Bonnie J. Lisle (essay date 1984)
Bonnie J. Lisle (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "Art and Egoism in George Eliot's Poetry," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 22, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 263-78.
[In the following excerpt, Lisle argues that while Eliot's poems are flawed, they are nevertheless worth pursuing as avenues to understanding George Eliot and her novels.]
One of the greatest English novelists, George Eliot remains at best a second-rate poet. That the poems are so pedestrain, in fact, may tempt us to overlook their real importance. George Eliot insisted that "every one … represents an idea which I care for strongly and wish to propagate as far as I can. Else I should forbid myself from adding to the mountainous heap of poetical collections" [The George Eliot Letters, 1954-78]. Whatever their dubious merits as verse, the poems embody "ideas" that afford us insight into the writer and her fiction.
George Eliot's poetry can help us particularly to understand her...
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