ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore how and why certain fictions of the feminine are important in constructing the identity of the Victorian male poet, and to discuss the connection those fictions have with the formation of poetic vision. If one had to suggest a single quality which in the eyes of the Victorians characterized Shelley, the poet and his poetry, it might well be ‘sensitiveness’. Shelley’s cultivation of a feminine lyricism seems to deliberate, reflecting at least one of his conceptions of the poet’s role, and as such it was accepted by his Victorian admirers. It is conventional wisdom to assume that in Victorian poetry the Sublime disappears to be replaced by a preoccupation with visible particulars, a loving attention to detail which can be seen as a manifestation of the Beautiful. Victorian poetry does not lose the Sublime, although it may go underground to reveal itself in an outbreak of power.
