The Romantic Poets: A Guide to Criticism

Introduction.

1. William Blake (1757–1827).

Critical History: From First Responses to Northrop Frye.

Extract from Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947).

Further reading.

Critical History: Historical and Political Readings.

Extract from David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954).

Further reading.

Critical History: To the Present.

Extract from V. A. De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the.

Sublime (1991).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

2. William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

Critical History: The Contemporary Reception.

Extract from William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Wordsworth’, in The Spirit of the Age.

(1825).

Further reading.

Critical History: Arnold to Hartman: From ‘Nature’ to ‘Vision’.

Extract from Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (1964).

Further reading.

Critical History: Historicizing Wordsworth.

Extract from Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989).

Further reading.

Critical History: To the Present.

Extract from David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry.

of the 1790s (1998).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).

Critical History: From the 1790s to the 1930s.

Extract from J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927).

Further reading.

Critical History: Idealizing Coleridge.

Extract from John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (1959).

Further reading.

Critical History: Deconstructing Coleridge.

Extract from J. J. McGann, ‘The Ancient Mariner: The Meaning of.

Meanings’ in The Beauty of Inflections (1985).

Further reading.

Critical History: To the Present.

Extract from Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

4. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824).

Critical History: From Contemporary Responses to Victorian Readings.

Extract from Joseph Mazzini, ‘On Byron and Goethe’ (1839).

Further reading.

Critical History: The Early Twentieth Century.

Extract from T. S. Eliot, ‘Byron’ (1937).

Further reading.

Critical History: Canonical Byron: The 1960s and Onwards.

Extract from J. J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (1968).

Further reading.

Critical History: Byron and Politics.

Extract from Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic.

Writing and Commercial Society (1993).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

5. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

Critical History: From Contemporary Responses to the Twentieth Century.

Extract from C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism.

(1954).

Further reading.

Critical History: Shelley, Scepticism and Idealism.

Extract from Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (1971).

Further reading.

Critical History: Shelley and Socialism.

Extract from Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the.

Poet in Shelley (1989).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

6. John Keats (1795–1821).

Critical History: The Contemporary Reception.

Extract from J. G. Lockhart (‘Z’), ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’ (No. 4) in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1818).

Further reading.

Critical History: Keats Canonized: The Victorian Period to the Twentieth Century.

Extract from Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963).

Further reading.

Critical History: Class, Gender and Politics: Keats’s Anxiety.

Extract from Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a.

Style (1988).

Further reading.

Critical History: History and Politics: Keats’s Radicalism.

Extract from Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

7. An Expanding Canon.

Critical History: John Clare (1793–1864).

Extract from John Barrell, ‘Being is Perceiving: James Thomson and John.

Clare’ in Poetry, Language, and Politics (1988).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Critical History: Romantic Women Poets.

Extract from Stuart Curran, ‘Romantic Poetry: The I Altered’ in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne Mellor (1988).

Further reading.

Useful editions.

Reference material.

Chapter notes.

Index