SOURCE: Lucas, John. “Meredith as Poet.” In Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, edited by Ian Fletcher, pp. 14-33. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.

In the following essay, Lucas faults Meredith for inept rhyming, excessive grandiloquence, and generally faulty writing. Lucas frames his criticism as an attempt to take Meredith seriously as a poet, arguing that his successes cannot be properly valued unless his failings are clearly understood.

When Oscar Wilde called Meredith a prose Browning he was no doubt thinking of the novels, but his remark can be applied with equal justice to the poetry. For there is an undeniably prosaic quality about much of Meredith's large output of verse; it seems to have no inner compulsion or buoyancy, and above all it is unnatural. Anybody who sets himself the task of reading the collected poems is bound to come away from them recognizing that Meredith too often...