1. Introduction: A Poetics of Encounter; 2. Dialogue and the Idyll: Tennyson and Landor; 3. Performing Conversation: Swinburne and Robert Browning; 4. Projects of Animation: Coleridge and Clare; 5. Ecphrastic Questions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Michael Field; 6. Cruel Intimacies: Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy; Epilogue: Louise Glück's Secret Conversations.