George Eliot is widely recognized as one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century; yet, more often than not, her two volumes of poetry are ignored in modern critical assessments. Like so many of her contemporaries, she tried to make significant literary contributions in more than one genre; her poems--both narrative and lyric--deal, however, with some of the same themes which inform her novels and her short stories. Her poems are much less accomplished than her prose fiction--only one poem, "O May I Join the Choir Invisible," has achieved any lasting fame--but they do stand as an informative window to her life as a writer and as an important gloss on aspects of her better-known work.

George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in rural Warwickshire, near Arbury Hall on the estate of Sir Francis Newdigate, for whom her father, Robert Evans, was agent. Her mother...