This compilation, edited by Edmund D. Jones, brings together critical essays that delve into the nuances of English poetry from the 19th century. Readers are introduced to the rich tapestry of literary criticism, exploring the depth and beauty of English poetry. The essays provide insights into the evolution of poetic forms, themes, and styles during this influential period.

In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression.

Indian poets who wrote in English—a small middle class minority—were divided from the regional language poets by more than language for long. The English poets had a selected readership, were known unto themselves, in academic circles if they were widely published, but were looked down upon with a kind of derision by regional writers. However, the scenario has changed now. From English being spurned as a colonizer’s tongue that was nobody’s language, it has now become everybody’s language with English medium schools, English movies, ads, soaps and serials. For a generation living in a global village, genuine readership and appreciation of English poetry is no longer an encumbrance. This book, in its second edition, continues to educate the students with diverse and thought-provoking essays that vary from personal to argumentative to objectively discursive English literature and to those who are genuinely interested in Indian English poetry. The Fourteen poets selected in this anthology are Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo Ghosh, Sarojini Naidu, Jibanananda Das, Nissim Ezekiel, Jayanta Mahapatra, A.K. Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Rajagopal Parthasarathy, Kamala Das, and Dilip Chitre. The poets included are all on the syllabi of major universities in India.