A Companion to Romantic Poetry

It has never been possible to adequately define either Romanticism or Romantic poetry. There are no uncontested dates with which to delimit the period historically; neither is there an essential set of qualities which makes a poem unequivocally Romantic. Beyond argument, however, is the critical role that Romantic poetry has played and continues to play in evaluations of the achievements of British poetry.

The elusive nature of the period has meant that, historically, the study of Romantic poetry has been organised around just six canonical figures -- Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats -- and structured in terms of the categories generated by their works alone. Today our sense of both the achievements and the possibilities of Romantic poetry is far more expansive. This collection of 34 provocative new essays attests to the remarkable diversity of the period and encourages us to take a different approach to this body of work by refocusing our attention on the revitalised matters of form, metre, and genre.