Early in Form & Faith in Victorian Poetry & Religion, Kirstie Blair asserts, “Victorian poets and their readers shared a vocabulary relating to contemporary religious debates that we have largely lost. And one of the keywords in this vocabulary was ‘form’” (5). Throughout the rest of her book, Blair creates a rich context for the importance of form within Victorian Christianity and demonstrates how recognizing its importance enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of the Christian ideas of poets as varied as the Brownings, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Hopkins. With her detailed exploration of Victorian Christianity, Blair is one of a growing number of scholars who have begun to reconsider the Victorian secularization narrative by focusing on the importance of faith rather than the prevalence of doubt. Following in the tradition of works such as Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006), Emma Mason and Mark Knight's Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006), F. E. Gray's Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women's Poetry (2010), and Charles LaPorte's Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011), Form & Faith asks its readers to consider the complexities of faith within the Victorian period and to recognize various ways Christianity was represented through forms in architecture, liturgy, and poetry.

As she conducts her study, Blair employs the methodology of strategic formalism: a term coined by Caroline Levine in which “detailed close reading [is combined] with the analysis of broader historical relations” (9). Blair begins by immersing the reader in historical as well as literary context as she devotes the first chapter to the Tractarians. Using examples from Tractarian poetry and prose that reveal various controversies regarding forms of worship, Blair effectively demonstrates that the Tractarians' concern for reviving more formal aspects of worship became a touchstone for all Victorian Christians, for “Victorian religious allegiances began to be read in terms of an individual's support for or condemnation of form” (22). In the next two chapters, she strengthens this thesis by exploring reflections on church architecture and liturgy that reveal how ideas about the value of form circulate within these discourses as Victorian Christians question which forms are most appropriate for bringing individuals closer to God. Moving fluidly among these examples, Blair demonstrates that the Tractarian view of form “as a container for feeling, a safeguard or barrier, whose aim was to regulate emotion and to calm it” (8) was influential throughout the Victorian era as writers from various perspectives repeatedly wrestled with it.

After providing this detailed context, Blair explores how poets from different Christian traditions respond to these Tractarian ideas: the Brownings representing the dissenters, Tennyson representing the Broad Church, and Rossetti and Hopkins representing the Anglo-Catholics/Catholics. Her chapter on the Brownings is the most successful. While Blair focuses primarily on Christmas-Eve and Aurora Leigh to demonstrate the connection between the Brownings' dissenting views of Christianity and their tendency to “emphasize forms as dynamic, potentially unstable, on the verge of splitting open” (123), she places her close reading of these poems within the context of letters and other poems that not only illustrates how embedded the Brownings were within these religious discussions but also reveals how interpretations of other poems like “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” become much richer within this context. With this chapter Blair crafts a compelling argument that illustrates the importance of placing these authors within the context of these religious discussions about form.

The following chapter in which Blair describes Tennyson's poetry as revealing “a strong impatience with ritualism” while still upholding form “as something that might constitute and sustain faith” (165) is also persuasive. Here, however, her argument is not as consistently strong. While her close reading of “Akbar's Dream” effectively reveals Tennyson's hope in form “as a means . . . of feeling the steady beat of a divine presence” (196), her discussion of In Memoriam is not as successful. Her overall argument that the poem “liberally admits that forms are sometimes inadequate as a basis for faith, while insistently framing its own faith through form” (189) may be true, but it could have been supported more strongly by closer attention to more of the poem. Given the complexities of In Memoriam as it asserts various stances on form, a more detailed reading would have been more persuasive.

The complexities of the evidence also lead to problems in the final chapter on Rossetti and Hopkins. While Blair does an excellent job positioning these poets within the context of lesser-known Catholic and Anglo-Catholic poets, she limits her in-depth discussion of each writer to the few Rossetti poems included in Orby Shipley's collections of poems and to a couple of Hopkins' sonnets. Blair acknowledges her discussion's limited scope, but this glimpse still seems tantalizing brief, particularly given the intense religious focus both poets have throughout their works. While Blair's readings of these few poems demonstrate effectively how Rossetti and Hopkins reveal their belief in the power of church ritual, readers may wish to see more of the complexity of how these writers grapple with form throughout their works. When Blair asserts that Hopkins uses his sonnets as “experiments in combining adherence to what he perceived as better and clearer laws than those commonly held . . .with new liberties of expression” (228), for instance, readers may desire a discussion that moves beyond “Carrion Comfort.”

Despite the minor inconsistencies of analysis in the last two chapters, Blair's book presents a powerful argument that compels readers to see these poets in a new light as we consider their various positions within the controversial discussions about form in the Victorian era. By combining a detailed look at the historical context with impressive close readings of individual works, Blair persuasively demonstrates the importance of paying attention to poetic form as we explore Victorian poets' perspectives on Christianity.