English Romantic poetry from its beginnings and its flowering to the first signs of its decadence

Nearly all the famous piéces de résistance will be found here—"Intimations of Immortality," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Tyger," excerpts from Don Juan—s well as some less familiar poems. As muchas possible, the poets are arranged in chronological order, and their poems in order of composition, beginning with eighteenth-century precursors such as Gray, Cowper, Burns, and Chatterton. Naturally, most space has been given over to the major Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Clare, and Keats—although their successors, poets such as Beddoes and Poe, are included, too, as well as early poems by Tennyson and Browning. In an excellent introduction, David Wright discusses the Romantics as a historical phenomenon, and points out their central ideals and themes.

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