Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

Melanie Turunen created this anthology as part of a final research project for Alison Chapman’s ENSH366: Victorian Poetry class in Spring 2025.

Melanie writes: In my anthology, I selected 19th-century poems that engage in what I call ‘Dog Poetics’ (the poetic exploration of the human-dog relationship) to investigate what dog poetry may reflect about gendered emotional connections, and how the aesthetic or demographic of the primary print in which the poems appeared may deepen our critical understanding of human-animal relationships. Prioritizing works that illuminate themes of companionship, love, and loss, I draw from periodicals such as Atalanta, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, and Good Words with the goal of starting a dialogue about the role of dogs as poetic subjects and emotional companions. By choosing this material and poetic approach, I examine how poets use lyrical and elegiac forms to express sentimentality toward dogs, with print context further shaping these emotional representations. My findings suggest that love and loss unite poets across formal, material, and gendered boundaries.