The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry

An engaging collection of new essays covering Romantic poetry, its historical and literary contexts, its forms, and its enduring appeal.

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history; its influence on other genres; its reflections of empire and nationalism, both within and outside the British Isles; and the various implications of oral transmission and the rapid expansion of print culture and mass readership. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside the achievements of some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

Introduction: the companionable forms of Romantic poetry James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane; 1. The living pantheon of poets in 1820: pantheon or canon? Jeffrey N. Cox; 2. Romantic poetry and antiquity Nick Groom; 3. Romantic meter and form Susan Stewart; 4. Romantic poetry and the standardisation of English Andrew Elfenbein; 5. Thinking in verse Simon Jarvis; 6. Romantic poetry and the romantic novel Ann Wierda Rowland; 7. Wordsworth's Great Ode: Romanticism and the progress of poetry James Chandler; 8. Romantic poetry, sexuality, gender Adriana Craciun; 9. Poetry peripheries and empire Tim Fulford; 10. Romantic poetry and the science of nostalgia Kevis Goodman; 11. Rethinking Romantic poetry and history: lyric resistance, lyric seduction William Keach; 12. The medium of Romantic poetry Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane; 13. Romantic poets and contemporary poetry Andrew Bennett; Index.

This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of Romantic poetry in its literary and historical contexts. Attention is given to the work of less well-known or recently rediscovered authors, alongside some of the greatest poets in the English language: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Burns, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Clare.

James Chandler is Director of the Franke Institute of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Maureen N. McLane was educated at the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago. She is the author of Same Life: Poems (2008), Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge University Press, 2000; Paperback, 2006). A contributing editor at the Boston Review, she was for years the chief poetry critic of the Chicago Tribune, and her articles on poetry, contemporary fiction, teaching, and sexuality have appeared in many venues, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Poet, the Poetry Foundation website, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, the Chicago Review, and the Harvard Review. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and in 2007 she was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the NBCC. She has taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project, and is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department at NYU. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, American Poet, The New Yorker, Slate, Canary, Circumference, A Public Space, American Letters and Commentary, The American Scholar, New American Writing, the Harvard Review, and Jacket. Her interests include contemporary poetry, British romanticism, balladry, historiography, psychoanalysis, anthropology, American studies and Scottish studies.