READING ROMANTIC POETRY

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

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.