SOURCE: Mermin, Dorothy. “Clough and Meredith.” In The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets, pp. 109-44. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Mermin sees Modern Love as a turning point in Meredith's career, from poet to novelist. Mermin proposes that the narrative style of the poem suggests a type of psychological realism and awareness of time that is characteristic of Victorian novels.

Modern Love¹ is composed, like Amours de Voyage, of a series of poems very much like dramatic monologues, framed and interrupted by a highly problematic third-person narrator, that tell a contemporary tale of the failure of love between two highly intelligent, introspective, analytical, and scrupulously honest people. But Modern Love is both more obtrusively “poetical” (in a derogatory sense) and more intricately novelistic than Amours de Voyage. Despite the rich, dense imagery, the self-sufficiency of many of the individual stanzas...