SOURCE: Harris, Wendell. “Sifting and Sorting Meredith's Poetry.” In The Victorian Experience: The Poets, edited by Richard A. Levine, pp. 115-37. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Harris argues that Meredith's poetry is often misread when critics attempt to analyze it as a coherent body of work. Harris identifies Meredith's “Earth” poems of the 1880s as some of his most successful, aside from Modern Love, which stands apart from both Meredith's corpus and most Victorian poetry as an original expression of love's hypocritical sentimentality.

Meredith is one of the curiosities of literature: few would seriously challenge his place as a major nineteenth-century writer, yet almost no one champions him enthusiastically as novelist, as essayist, or as poet. Only The Egoist and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel among the novels are much read; the “Essay on Comedy” offers little pleasure or enlightenment (the comic spirit is there...