SOURCE: Bailey, John. “The Poetry of George Meredith.” The Fortnightly Review n.s. 86 (July-December 1909): 32-46.

In the following essay, Bailey attempts to offer a balanced view of Meredith as a poet, acknowledging Meredith's frequent failures to please the ear, as well as the intellectual challenges his poetry poses for readers. Meredith's best poems, Bailey concludes, rival the works of John Milton, William Wordsworth, or Percy Bysshe Shelley, particularly in their ability to present a universal perspective.

The other day a subscriber to the London Library was told, on asking for Meredith's works, that the novels were all out, and that of the ten or dozen volumes of poems only two or three were in. Probably that represents the high-water mark of a demand for Meredith. For the moment, death is supreme, and the whole of that not very large world that cares for books is thinking and talking...