James Jackson

My research focuses on the connections between two types of nineteenth-century long poem. The first of these is ‘spasmodic’ poetry, a group of long, emotionally intense dramas written around the 1840s to mid-1850s by young poets such as Philip James Bailey, Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell. The second is the contemporary-realist verse-novel that flourished later in the 1850s and 1860s, mostly written by better-known poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough and Robert Browning. These genres, though dissimilar in some ways, have intriguing affinities. In particular, I am interested in the concept of drama/the dramatic and how it is employed – formally, modally and thematically – by both types of poem.