This comprehensive survey of British Romantic poetry explores the work of six poets whose names are most closely associated with the Romantic era – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, and Shelley – as well as works by other significant but less widely studied poets such as Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Along with its exceptional coverage, the volume is alert to relevant contexts, and opens up ways of understanding Romantic poetry.
The Romantic Poetry Handbook encompasses the entire breadth of the Romantic Movement, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld to Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Clare. In its central section ‘Readings’ it explores tensions, change, and continuity within the Romantic Movement, and examines a wide range of individual poems and poets through sensitive, attentive, and accessible analyses. In addition, the authors provide a full introduction, a detailed historical and cultural timeline, biographies of the poets whose works are featured, and a helpful guide to further reading.
The Romantic Poetry Handbook is an ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of British Romantic poetry. It will also appeal to those with a general interest in poetry and Romantic literature.
Michael O’Neill, is Professor of English at Durham University, UK. He has published widely on many aspects of Romantic literature, especially the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Victorian poetry, and an array of British, Irish, and American twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets. His most recent book is, as editor, John Keats in Context (2017). He has also published three volumes of poetry.
Madeleine Callaghan, is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is co-editor of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), Assistant Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2012), and author of Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays (2017).