INTRODUCTION

When we use the term “Romantic poetry,” we are referring to a school of poetry—though it was hardly a formalized discipline—that emerged in the late eighteenth century, partly in response to the preceding Augustan era and the precepts that shaped its literature. And when we use the term “Romantic poets” with regard to the British Romantics, we are referring to six primary poets, representing two “generations”: William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the first generation, and Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats in the second generation.

The notion that there were two separate generations of British Romantic poets is, of course, an artificial distinction that scholars have imposed retroactively to grapple more readily with the contributions made by each. Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on their first volume of poetry, and Byron and Shelley socialized with one another, but all six of these poets were contemporaries and, in fact, the three members of the so-called first generation outlived the three members of the second generation. Their slight age differences notwithstanding, they all shared certain aesthetic values and artistic sensibilities that we associate with the era in which they wrote.

Chief among these was their championing of the power of imagination. Unlike their neoclassical predecessors, whose poetry and prose were products of what we have come to consider the Age of Reason, the Romantics believed that their poets’ imaginations transformed how they saw the world. Imagination was the means by which they channeled the strong emotions that imbued their poetry—what Wordsworth referred to as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—into evocative imagery and forms of expression that made the poet not merely an observer but the interpreter of the world around him. The natural world often served as a touchstone for their imaginative flights and nature imagery pervades their verse, from the albatross in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” whose killing represents man’s moral transgression against nature, to Mont Blanc, the Alpine mountain in Shelley’s poem of the same name, whose towering mass invites reflection on the sublime. Indeed, in the work of these poets affinity with nature serves much the same function that religious belief serves in the work of poets from earlier eras.

For all of their shared sensibilities, each of the British Romantics developed a unique personality and style that testifies to his creative individuality: Blake’s anti-doctrinalism in his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience; Wordsworth’s fondness for rural themes and settings; Coleridge’s visionary reach in “Kubla Khan”; Byron’s defiant hero in “The Prisoner of Chillon” (a prototype for what we recognize today as the Byronic hero); Shelley’s effusive outpourings of sentiment in “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark”; Keats’ search for beauty in art and nature in his various odes. The poems collected in this volume represent some of the best and most representative work of their authors, and are as enjoyable today as when they were written more than two centuries ago.