From Queen's Gardens

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry burns with a fervor that still feels dangerous two centuries later. These thirty poems capture her at her most intimate and radical: the sonnets that redefined love poetry, the verses that spoke of desire and devotion when women were expected to be silent about both. Here is a poet who fled her father's tyrannical household for a secret marriage, who wrote some of the most passionate verses in the English language to her husband Robert, who believed poetry could change the world. The collection includes selections from her masterpiece 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' alongside poems of social conscience, including her searing abolitionist work. Barrett Browning wrote that poetry was 'the highest art' because it moved the heart and sharpened the conscience simultaneously. These poems prove she lived that conviction. For readers who have forgotten that poetry can set you on fire.