Pre-Romantic Poetry intervenes powerfully in debates about eighteenth-century writing, Romanticism, and literary history. By arguing that 'pre-romanticism' exists to patrol the limits of 'romantic' writing the book questions existing approaches to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, and to period-based study more generally. As well as presenting pioneering re-interpretations of poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry reads late-eighteenth-century poetry alongside earlier writers (especially Alexander Pope) and later ones (including William Wordsworth and John Keats). Paying particular attention to pastoral poetry, patronage, and occasional poetry, the book historicizes questions of language and form in order to shift prevailing notions of eighteenth-century and Romantic writing.
This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints
The poetry of the Graveyard School - gloomy meditations on mortality, often composed in churchyards - was immensely popular in 18th-century England and was an important forerunner of the Romantic period and a major influence on the development of the Gothic novel. Yet, despite the unquestioned significance of the Graveyard Poets, critical attention has been scant, and until now there has been no critical anthology of their works. The Graveyard School: An Anthology features works by thirty-three authors and provides a broad and comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of Graveyard poetry. Included are seminal works, such as Robert Blair's "The Grave", Thomas Parnell's "A Night Piece on Death", and excerpts from Edward Young's Night Thoughts, as well as once-popular but now little-remembered poems by authors like Mark Akenside, James Beattie, and James Hervey. Of particular interest in this collection is its inclusion and discussion of authors not normally associated with the Graveyard School, such as Alexander Pope and Washington Irving, as well as a number of female poets, among them Susanna Blamire and Charlotte Smith. Edited by Prof. Jack G. Voller, who provides an introduction and extensive annotations throughout, this volume of melancholy and macabre verse is certain to be welcomed by scholars and students of 18th-century and Gothic literature, as well as those readers interested in the darker side of literature.
Rich selection of 123 poems by six great English Romantic poets: William Blake (24 poems), William Wordsworth (27 poems), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (10 poems), Lord Byron (16 poems), Percy Bysshe Shelley (24 poems) and John Keats (22 poems). Introduction and brief commentaries on the poets. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "Ozymandias" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
On its first appearance English Poetry of the Romantic Period was widely praised as on of the best introductions to the subject. This edition includes updated material in the light of recent work in Romanticism and Romantic poetry. The book discusses the concerns that linked the Romantic poets, from their responses to the political and social upheavals around them to their interest in the poet's visionary and prophetic role. It includes helpful and authoritative discussions of figures such as Blake, Clare, Coleridge, Crabbe, Keats, Scott, Shelley and Wordsworth.
Romantic Returns explores the theorization and operation of ?imagination in pre-romantic and romantic writing. Drawing on the poetry and prose of William Collins, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, it shows the continuing importance of their understanding of imagination for contemporary debates about the historicity of literature. Historicist readings of romanticism have done much to establish how and why romantic aesthetics is ideological?an illusory if effective evasion of its material conditions. Romantic Returns challenges this position by arguing that romantic aesthetics is, rather, critical?a reflective if problematic articulation of those conditions. The argument foregrounds the ways in which the aesthetics of romanticism inform its political and economic speculations. The book opens with an examination of mid-eighteenth-century debates about the role of superstition in the constitution of a national literary tradition. It considers, in particular, how Collins's odes figure Scotland as the site of a ?superstitious poetry that must be assimilated into British history even as Collins questions the very framework of assimilation. This ambiguous defense of superstition in the national polity is rewritten by romanticism as a defense of imagination. For the romantics, the concept of imagination involves an explicit theorization of how the mind's projections play a constitutive role in what appear to be social norms and economic facts. Hazlitt clarifies this position in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The Essay develops a rhetorical theory of imagination in order to deconstruct the entire metaphysical basis of self-interest on which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy is based. Hazlitt's political pamphlets bring this argument to bear on his analysis of the economic interests fueling the Napleonic wars. Despite Hazlitt's enormous and widely acknowledged influence, his writings have been little studied on their own account. Romantic Returns underlies their centrality to the romantic articulation of aesthetics and politics. The final sections of the book engage Shelley's complex interrogation of the contradictions involved in just such articulations. In both his poetry and prose, Shelley turns to law and history as fields in which these contradictions can be negotiated or even resolved. But Shelley, who once called poets ?unacknowledged legislators, suggests that violence may be unavoidable in any imaginative legislation that attempts to realize itself in properly ?historical action. The passage from poetry to politics cannot evade the problem of force. Tracing the crossings between ?superstition, ?imagination, and ?history in all three of these writers, Romantic Returns shows how difficult it is to maintain such crossings. In doing so, it shows, too, the continuing challenge of romanticism to contemporary historicism.
The first study to offer an integral theory of love poetry, examining why it is that poetry, even more than other arts, is so consistently associated with romantic love.
Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti crowns this outstanding collection: highlights include "The Blessed Damozel," "My Sister's Sleep," and selections from The House of Life. Also includes Christina Rossetti's "Remember," "Cousin Kate," and "Song," plus Swinburne, and more
