Sally West's timely study is the first book-length exploration of Coleridge's influence on Shelley's poetic development. Beginning with a discussion of Shelley's views on Coleridge as a man and as a poet, West argues that there is a direct correlation between Shelley's desire for political and social transformation and the way in which he appropriates the language, imagery, and forms of Coleridge, often transforming their original meaning through subtle readjustments of context and emphasis. While she situates her work in relation to recent concepts of literary influence, West is focused less on the psychology of the poets than on the poetry itself. She explores how elements such as the development of imagery and the choice of poetic form, often learnt from earlier poets, are intimately related to poetic purpose. Thus on one level, her book explores how the second-generation Romantic poets reacted to the beliefs and ideals of the first, while on another it addresses the larger question of how poets become poets, by returning the work of one writer to the literary context from which it developed. Her book is essential reading for specialists in the Romantic period and for scholars interested in theories of poetic influence.

This 2003 study sheds light on the way in which the English Romantics dealt with the basic problems of knowledge, particularly as they inherited them from the philosopher David Hume. Kant complained that the failure of philosophy in the eighteenth century to answer empirical scepticism had produced a culture of 'indifferentism'. Tim Milnes explores the way in which Romantic writers extended this epistemic indifference through their resistance to argumentation, and finds that it exists in a perpetual state of tension with a compulsion to know. This tension is most clearly evident in the prose writing of the period, in works such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Milnes argues that it is in their oscillation between knowledge and indifference that the Romantics prefigure the ambivalent negotiations of modern post-analytic philosophy.

Sublime Coleridge focuses on the role of the Opus Maximum in explaining Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime. This book is an introduction, a reader's guide, and an interpretation of this central text in British Romanticism.

How have our conceptions of truth been shaped by romantic literature? This question lies at the heart of this examination of the concept of truth both in romantic writing and in modern criticism. The romantic idea of truth has long been depicted as aesthetic, imaginative and ideal. Tim Milnes challenges this picture, demonstrating a pragmatic strain in the writing of Keats, Shelley and Coleridge in particular, that bears a close resemblance to the theories of modern pragmatist thinkers such as Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas. Romantic pragmatism, Milnes argues, was in turn influenced by recent developments within linguistic empiricism. This book will be of interest to readers of romantic literature, but also to philosophers, literary theorists, and intellectual historians.