There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work. George Meredith (1828–1909), conspicuous in his time as both a novelist and a poet, never became a convincing poet on the order of Hardy or Lawrence. He is now known for only one poetic work, “Modern Love,” a fifty-poem sequence that—unlike the rest of his poems, even such charming ones as “Love in the Valley”—engaged in a sustained and penetrating look inward.
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