Pre-raphaelite and Other Poets

Lafcadio Hearn's lectures on modern poetry reveal a critic of rare subtlety, preserved here through John Erskine's careful editing and illuminating introduction. Delivered in Tokyo to Japanese students and often spoken without manuscript, these talks seem simple at first glance, yet they unfold into remarkably penetrating readings of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets, especially Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, Morris, Meredith, Buchanan, and Bridges. Erskine presents them as a unique record of Hearn's teaching: intimate, lucid, and deeply alive to the inner structure of poems. Hearn's treatment of Rossetti is central, showing him as a poet of medieval dream, sensual beauty, and mystic yearning, but also of exact technique and human doubt. Through close readings of "The Mirror," "The Honeysuckle," "The Woodspurge," "The Cloud Confines," "The Sea-Limits," "The Birth-Bond," and "Troy Town," he explores love, illusion, grief, mortality, and the infinite. The volume also ranges to Browning's moral vision in "Abt Vogler" and a powerful Russian tale of motherhood, conscience, and divine law, making this a wide-ranging study of art, ethics, and spiritual insight. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.