Of importance too is Meredith's development of the mythmaking processes that stem from his Romantic precursors, as well as his exploration of forms of narrative that tend to question established genres and conventions. Like his contemporaries Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and A. C. Swinburne, Meredith viewed the language of poetry as a field for experiment. The style of the poems only proclaims its artifice: Meredith is a conjurer with words, a juggler with syntax. The norms of language seem to exist for him primarily as points of departure. Meredith's stylistic idiosyncrasies puzzled some readers and alienated others: it is only recently that critics have begun to give Meredith's poems the appreciative reading they deserve.
When Meredith published his first volume, Poems, in 1851--at his own expense--he seemed to be declaring his allegiance to the Romantic tradition but not in any specific way. His early life in Portsmouth yields little information for the biographer of the poet. The years (1842-1844) Meredith spent at Neuwied on the Rhine, at a school run by the Moravian Brothers, shed more light on his work. The school's liberal and humane cast of thought was important, as was Meredith's first direct contact with the Continental culture and landscape that were to figure so significantly in his writing.
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