The latest installment of the Washington Post Book World‘s “First Encounters” series has Michael Dirda unpacking a series of poems by Victorian writer George Meredith. Meredith is a tough nut to crack; there’s a reason he’s read and remembered mainly by scholars. Meredith has his rewards, but to the modern ear his writing does sound, in Dirda’s words, “labored, overblown and clunky.”
Still, Meredith was an original, and it’s nice to see his Modern Love get a little ink in the WaPo. The poems in question tell of the break-up of a marriage, and Dirda mentions in a general way that Meredith wrote from the experience of his own failed marriage to Mary Ellen Meredith (n