Introduction: Arnold, europe, and the (future) destinations of Victorian Poetry

IF ONE WERE to attempt to compose an Atlas of Victorian Poetry—something to chart its destinations locally, nationally, and abroad—no poet would likely pose a greater logistical challenge than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was a problem her contemporaries struggled with as well, one compounded by the complex political attachments she felt to the locations of her poetry. After the great success of Aurora Leigh (1856), which crossed multiple national and generic borders, Poems before Congress (1860) was widely condemned in the British press as the work of a “denationalized fanatic” who could not see past her devotion to