Reading Romantic Poetry

by Stafford, Fiona

• ISBN13: 9781118228104
• ISBN10: 1118228103
• Edition: 1st
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2012-04-01
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

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.

• Provides a clear, lively introduction to Romantic Poetry, backed by academic research and marked by its accessibility to students with little prior experience of poetry
• Introduces many of the major topics of the age, from politics to publishing, from slavery to sociability, from Milton to the mind of man
• Encourages direct responses to poems by opening up different aspects of the literature and fresh approaches to reading
• Discusses the poets' own reading and experience of being read, as well as analysis of the sounds of key poems and the look of the poem on the page
• Deepens understanding of poems through awareness of their literary, historical, political and personal contexts
• Includes the major poets of the period, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Burns and Clare —as well as a host of less familiar writers, including women

Author Biography

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. Her most recent work, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry, explores the vital connection between poetry and place from the Romantic period to the present day.  She has also edited novels by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and is the author of Brief Lives: Jane Austen.    

Table of Contents

Preface.

Chapter One: The Pleasures of Poetry.

Painful Pleasures.

Public and Private.

Chapter Two: Solitude and Sociability.

Romantic Solitude.

The Romantic Resistance to Solitude.

Public and Private Friendships of Poets.

Friendships Tested and Trie.

Chapter Three: Common C.ncerns and Cultural Connections.

Common Causes: The Abolition.

Common Culture: Romantic Rainbows.

Chapter Four: Traditions and Transformations: Poets as Readers.

The Sonnet Revival.

Paradise Lost.

Native Traditions.

Chapter Five: Reading or Listening? Romantic Voices.

The Language of Conversation: Lyrical Ballads.

Oral and Rural.

Standard English and the Freedom of Speech.

Chapter Six: Sweet Sounds.

Romantic Nightingales.

Hidden Birds that Sing.

Sound and Sense.

Chapter Seven: Poems on Pages.

Romantic Poets: Then and Now.

Illuminated Books.

From Vision to Volume.

Christabel, and Other Poems, 1816.

Reading according to Composition or Publication?

References.