More Shopping OptionsIn recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.
Richard Cronin is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow.
He is a master of his subject, and his book is the most ground-breaking critique of the Romantic movement to have appeared... Times Literary Supplement (UK)
Introduction * Part I: The Revolutionary Years * Erasmus Darwin: From the Bastille to Birmingham * William Blake and Revolutionary Prophecy * The English Jacobins * Part II: The War Against Napoleon * Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy * Wordsworth at War * Mapping Childe Harold I and II * Part III: England in 1819 * Asleep in Italy: Byron and Shelley in 1819 * Leigh Hunt, Keats, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry
