It is difficult to define George Meredith's place among the major Victorian poets, in part because of his many claims to distinction. He is at once impresario and sage, prophet and man of the world. He is better known for his novels, although his poetry was at least as, if not more, important in his own eyes. The novels draw freely upon the resources of poetry--their style, for example, is often highly allusive and metaphorical. Meredith's poems, moreover, present in condensed and figurative form many of the concerns of the novels, among them a thematics of self and the place of self in society and nature, as well as a redefinition of narrative forms. But the poems are no mere gloss upon the novels. Their presentation of versions of the self, given to concealment, fictionalizing, and multiplicity; of landscape as a condition for self-discovery; and of a consequent...