This publication provides - for the first time since the late 1800s - a comprehensive anthology of sonnets written by Victorian poets. Covering both canonical and largely forgotten poets, the coverage ranges from single sonnets to complete sonnet sequences. Rather than restricting itself to a small number of sonnets from a limited list of poets, as in general Victorian poetry anthologies, this five-volume set includes a representative selection of sonnets for each individual poet in order to display the diversity and innovation brought to the sonnet form by Victorian poets. More than one hundred poets and over three thousand sonnets are included.

The anthology fills an important gap in the field of Victorian anthologies by making available a large number of examples of a poetic form that was one of the most important in nineteenth-century poetry. The sonnets are ordered chronologically by date of publication. This enables the reader to trace developments over a period of seventy years, during which a fundamental re-appraisal of the sonnet, in both structural and thematic forms, occurred.