This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints

Rich selection of 123 poems by six great English Romantic poets: William Blake (24 poems), William Wordsworth (27 poems), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (10 poems), Lord Byron (16 poems), Percy Bysshe Shelley (24 poems) and John Keats (22 poems). Introduction and brief commentaries on the poets. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "Ozymandias" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

The book studies metaphor, myth and their imaginative aspects in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Relying on Kantian, Romantic, Neo-Kantian and modern ideas of imagination, metaphor and myth, the book proposes that imagination is an inherently metaphorizing and mythologizing faculty because the act of perception is an act of giving form to natural phenomena and seeing similitude in dissimilitude, which are basically metaphorical and mythological acts. Studying selected poems, the author explores how in its form-giving activity the imagination of the speaking subject 'mythologizes' and 'metaphorizes' by seeing objects of nature as spiritual, animate or divine beings and thus transforming them into the alien territory of myth. Myth and metaphor are analyzed in these poems mainly in two regards: first, myth and metaphor are handled as inborn aspects of imagination and perception, and the interaction between nature and imagination is presented as the origin of all mythology; second, to show how myth is re-created time and again by poetic imagination, Romantic mythography and re-creation of precursor mythologies are analyzed.

Meet the rebellious young poets who brought about a literary revolution Rock stars may think they invented sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but the Romantic poets truly created the mold. In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety—or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Cole-ridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language, and their words changed literature forever. Wildly Romantic is a smart, sexy, and fascinating look at these original bad boys—and girls.

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.