SOURCE: "Art and Egoism in George Eliot's Poetry," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 22, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 263-78.

In the following excerpt, Lisle argues that while Eliot's poems are flawed, they are nevertheless worth pursuing as avenues to understanding George Eliot and her novels.

One of the greatest English novelists, George Eliot remains at best a second-rate poet. That the poems are so pedestrain, in fact, may tempt us to overlook their real importance. George Eliot insisted that "every one … represents an idea which I care for strongly and wish to propagate as far as I can. Else I should forbid myself from adding to the mountainous heap of poetical collections" [The George Eliot Letters, 1954-78]. Whatever their dubious merits as verse, the poems embody "ideas" that afford us insight into the writer and her fiction.

George Eliot's poetry can help us particularly to understand her troublesome insistence on marriage...