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In the later nineteenth century formal regularity was regarded as the hallmark of mathematical and scientific inquiry as well as the burgeoning “social sciences” and the arts—all presumed to be governed by formal “laws.” But insofar as formal regularity was seen to characterize natural and civil law, it allowed for an equivocation between them, such that formal laws might be understood to be not an abstraction from but an imposition on content. Thus conceived, form and content could actually be at odds, and this would have important implications for the arts. In the context of linguistic and literary study, the structures of languages and literatures were often allied with formal law while individual words were perceived as rich in meaning but wayward. Max Müller’s philology, Coventry Patmore’s prosody and poetry, and Christina Rossetti’s poetry all present form and content as being in tension, locked in a struggle for domination.

This chapter examines the formative relation between church architecture and religious poetry, particularly Tractarian poetry, in the 1830s and 1840s. It considers works from very different theological perspectives, including Isaac Williams' ‘The Cathedral’ and John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, and argues that the ‘central space’ for religious feeling represented by church architecture and poetry played a major role in the shaping of belief. The chapter also looks at Coventry Patmore's writings which address the question of ‘the reconciliation of life and law’ in gothic.

This chapter takes a break from the study and examination of the form and content of mid-Victorian poetry. Instead, it compiles poems that exemplify key elements of Meredith's verse: social commentary, sensory detail and synesthesia, narrativity, and the sonnet form. The chapter looks at poems such as Coventry Patmore's “The Angel in the House” or Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti's sonnets in order to identify certain similarities and patterns that emerge and are linked with Meredith's poetics. As is evident from the previous chapters, “Modern Love” takes inspiration from the traditional sonnet form, but also challenges and experiments with its form, thus turning it into something more modern. The chapter furthermore compares the steps and structures that each of these poets used in their composition of their sonnets, and how each one influenced the other.

Marital love is rarely represented by poets, at least in their lyric poetry. Lyric, with its brevity, its intensity, its ellipses, seems ideally suited to a particular type of passionate love typified by novelty, absence, uncertainty. Conjugal love, powerful though it may be, lacks these particular qualities. Yet if the pleasure and even purpose of marriage lies in discovering freedom and self-realization within strictly prescribed limits, then lyric could well be seen as the genre most suited to marital love. This chapter examines the tradition of marriage lyric that has developed, for the most part, in recent centuries, as the ideal of loving, companionate marriage has spread. Taking as its starting point the work of the Victorian poet and theorist Coventry Patmore, whose treatise on poetic meter illustrates the same ideals that mark his poems about marriage, the chapter ranges from Anne Bradstreet to Seamus Heaney and other contemporary poets of marital love.