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 Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

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."

This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.

Meet the rebellious young poets who brought about a literary revolution Rock stars may think they invented sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but the Romantic poets truly created the mold. In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety—or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Cole-ridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language, and their words changed literature forever. Wildly Romantic is a smart, sexy, and fascinating look at these original bad boys—and girls.

ENGLISH ROMANTIC WRITERS offers selections from authors who have traditionally held a large place in our consciousness of English Romanticism, but it also includes other figures--especially women--who have been less emphasized in the past. The intellectual discourses of the age concerning governance, politics, the impact of the French Revolution, gender and the status of women, the nature of nature and of human psychology, and the theory of literature and art are represented in the prose and poetry of writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys, and Keats.

Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?