SOURCE: Harris, Wendell. “Sifting and Sorting Meredith's Poetry.” In The Victorian Experience: The Poets, edited by Richard A. Levine, pp. 115-37. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982.
In the following essay, Harris argues that Meredith's poetry is often misread when critics attempt to analyze it as a coherent body of work. Harris identifies Meredith's “Earth” poems of the 1880s as some of his most successful, aside from Modern Love, which stands apart from both Meredith's corpus and most Victorian poetry as an original expression of love's hypocritical sentimentality.
