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Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, and the key poems and players of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare and political crisis.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
Summary
Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, and the key poems and players of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare and political crisis.
Report
"There are gems of insight on every page of this engaging and clarifying book, which opens up familiar and unfamiliar poems to considerations of verbal texture just as much as it reveals them in their cultural and political contexts. Stafford's Reading Romantic Poetryteaches as much by example as by precept. This is how to read Romantic poetry and it is, as such, an ideal introduction to the period's literary culture as a whole." (The BARS Review, 1 October 2014)
"These engagements with the nature of poetry are no mystical celebration of a mysterious power--on the contrary: by focusing on specific attempts Professor Stafford underlines the demystifying facet of these poems which lay bare their own artifice to their readers." (Cercles, 1 December 2012)
"An excellent, well-written resource for those interested in Romantic poetry ... Stafford brings a new sensibility and fresh eye to the subject ... Highly recommended." (Choice, 1 October 2012)
