Reading Romantic Poetry

Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, and the key poems and players of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare and political crisis. * Provides a clear, lively introduction to Romantic Poetry, backed by academic research and marked by its accessibility to students with little prior experience of poetry * Introduces many of the major topics of the age, from politics to publishing, from slavery to sociability, from Milton to the mind of man * Encourages direct responses to poems by opening up different aspects of the literature and fresh approaches to reading * Discusses the poets' own reading and experience of being read, as well as analysis of the sounds of key poems and the look of the poem on the page * Deepens understanding of poems through awareness of their literary, historical, political and personal contexts * Includes the major poets of the period, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Burns and Clare as well as a host of less familiar writers, including women

Table of Contents:
Preface. Chapter One: The Pleasures of Poetry. Painful Pleasures. Public and Private. Chapter Two: Solitude and Sociability. Romantic Solitude. The Romantic Resistance to Solitude. Public and Private Friendships of Poets. Friendships Tested and Trie. Chapter Three: Common C.ncerns and Cultural Connections. Common Causes: The Abolition. Common Culture: Romantic Rainbows. Chapter Four: Traditions and Transformations: Poets as Readers. The Sonnet Revival. Paradise Lost. Native Traditions. Chapter Five: Reading or Listening? Romantic Voices. The Language of Conversation: Lyrical Ballads. Oral and Rural. Standard English and the Freedom of Speech. Chapter Six: Sweet Sounds. Romantic Nightingales. Hidden Birds that Sing. Sound and Sense. Chapter Seven: Poems on Pages. Romantic Poets: Then and Now. Illuminated Books. From Vision to Volume. Christabel, and Other Poems, 1816. Reading according to Composition or Publication? References.