ABSTRACT
In the winter of 1861-62, George Meredith worked on a long poem, tentative titles for which were 'A Love-Match' and 'A Tragedy of Modern Love'. He was pleased to be creatively engaged, 'But the poem's morbid, and all about Love. So I despise my work, and sneer secretly at those that flatter me about it'. The finished work, a sequence of 5016line poems of four quatrains, was published in the spring of 1862 under the title Modern Love and a pre-emptive motto: 'This is not meat/For little people or for fools.' As he expected, Meredith received
a severe drilling from the Reviewers ... A man who hopes to be popular, must think from the mass, and as the heart of the mass ... as a dissection of the sentimental passion of these days, [his work] could only be apprehended by the few who would read it many times. I have not looked for it to succeed. Why did I write it? - Who can account for pressure?
