Festus

A sprawling philosophical poem in the tradition of Goethe’s Faust, Bailey’s work follows its hero Festus through heaven, earth, and hell as he wrestles with faith, doubt, love, and the fate of the soul. First published in 1839, it made the young author famous and became one of the most admired long poems of the Victorian age, quoted and imitated for decades. Bailey kept revising and enlarging it across many editions until it swelled to tens of thousands of lines. Its cosmic ambition and lush verse marked it as a founding work of the so-called Spasmodic school of English poetry. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.