Reading Romantic Poetry (Wiley Blackwell Reading Poetry) - Hardcover

There are gems of insight on every page of this engaging and clarifying book, which opens up familiar and unfamiliar poems to considerations of verbal texture just as much as it reveals them in their cultural and political contexts. Stafford s Reading Romantic Poetryteaches as much by example as by precept. This is how to read Romantic poetry and it is, as such, an ideal introduction to the period s literary culture as a whole. (The BARS Review, 1 October 2014) "These engagements with the nature of poetry are no mystical celebration of a mysterious power on the contrary: by focusing on specific attempts Professor Stafford underlines the demystifying facet of these poems which lay bare their own artifice to their readers." (Cercles, 1 December 2012) "An excellent, well-written resource for those interested in Romantic poetry Stafford brings a new sensibility and fresh eye to the subject ... Highly recommended." (Choice, 1 October 2012)

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