Kirstie Blair explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. She argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessing the discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, including Browning's Christmas-Eve and Tennyson's In Memoriam, to show how High Anglican debates over formal worship were dealt with by Dissenting, Broad Church and Roman Catholic poets and other writers. This book features major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - from different Christian denominations, but also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers, particularly the Tractarian or Oxford Movement poets whose writings are studied in detail here. Form and Faith presents a new take on Victorian poetry by showing how important now-forgotten religious controversies were to the content and form of some of the best-known poems of the period. In methodology and content, it also relates strongly to current critical interest in poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which 'form' carried a particular weight of significance.

"an impressively detailed book. Blair is at her best when subtly tweaking a line of verse ... to bring out its latenet meanings." - Angela Leighton, Times Literary Supplement

"Blairs project excels in scope and originality." - Denny Kinlaw, Transpositions

"Blair has written a subtle and fascinating study that should be of interest as much to historians as to literary scholars." - Gareth Atkins, English Historical Review

"[an] important book ... Both the book's argument and its wide-ranging scholarship make it a valuable resource." - M. E. Burnstein, CHOICE

"[a] fine, substantive study of form and faith in Victorian poetry and religion" - Karen Dieleman, Review 19

"As a study that introduces the history of Victorian religion through the aesthetics of Victorian poetry, Form and Faith is a book one might recommend to students as well as colleagues. There is no question that it is an instantly quotable, enabling and helpful book which promises immense critical longevity." - Emma Mason, Literature & History