This course surveys the poetry of the Victorian era in Britain, with a focus on experiments in poetic genre and form, and on the social and political commitments of poetry in a period of colonialism, industrialization, and changing ideas about gender and sexuality. Topics may include lyric and the dramatic monologue, the poetry of political protest, love and sexuality, feminism and queerness, aestheticism and decadence, empire and the emergence of global poetry in English, and pastoral and the poetry of urban life. Poets may include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. C. Swinburne, Toru Dutt, George Meredith, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Thomas Hardy, Sarojini Naidu, and many others.