‘ “Unworthy of a Serious Song?”: Twentieth-Century Love Poetry and its Critics’

The sub-genre of love poetry, historically central to the development of verse in the English language, has been strangely neglected since its heyday in Victorian times. This essay attempts to account for its declining reputation in the twentieth century, both with influential poets and academic critics, identifying the modernist tenet of impersonality and the New Critical aversion to extrinsic and biographical material as major hindrances to the appreciation of what is a uniquely 'personal' and autobiographical form of writing.