Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe

This volume, edited and with a superb introduction by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image—and miraculously succeeding.

The period from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth saw the development of the Romantic definition of man, which rejected the previous exaltation of Reason. Romanticism places a supreme importance on art as one of the noblest consummations of human consciousness; thus the subject of the greatest long poem of this period, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, is not heroic action or a moral decision, but the Growth of a Poet’s Mind. States of feeling and being, of experiencing rather than doing, are the Romantic concern. One of the richest for poetry, the Romantic Movement is represented by Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, to name a few, plus Emerson, Poe, and other Americans.