Reading Romantic Poetry
Wiley Blackwell Reading Poetry Series

• 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

Preface vii

1 The Pleasures of Poetry 1

2 Solitude and Sociability 34

3 Common Concerns and Cultural Connections 65

4 Traditions and Transformations: Poets as Readers 95

5 Reading or Listening? Romantic Voices 132

6 Sweet Sounds 162

7 Poems on Pages 193

References 227

Index 230

Fiona Stafford is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She has published on a wide range of Romantic literature, and is especially interested in the literary relationships between England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. She has written several books including Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (2010) and Brief Lives: Jane Austen (2008), and has edited Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (2013), as well as novels by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.