Overview: Argues that certain poets understood the rhetorical power of poetic soul-talk for challenging reductive reasoning, empty abstractions, and the depersonalizing effects of an increasingly mechanized, buThis book explores the decades between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1884 when British poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, along with their transatlantic contemporary Walt Whitman, defended the civil rights of disenfranchised souls as Western nations slowly evolved toward modern democracies with shared transnational
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