The Invisible World: Lectures on British Romantic Poetry and the Romantic Imagination - Softcover

.....wonderful powers of reading the text....students who want to get close to the poetry could still hardly do better'. Keith Hanley, Lancaster. '..newly published work by a major critic;...a necessary volume, one that should be in all university libraries.' Michael O'Neill, Durham. 'The Invisible World' contains ten chapters on important aspects of Romantic Poetry. There are detailed assessments of the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats with references to Shelley and Byron. Central 'Romantic' questions are addressed such as: What did Romanticism consist of? What was the Romantic Imagination? How did Wordsworth engage with the French Revolution? How did Wordsworth engage with women? What was the importance of Ossian and Burns? How does an eccentric writer like Blake fit into 'Romanticism'? What do the great Romantic poets have in common? How far is Coleridge indebted to Cowper in 'Frost at Midnight' and how does his own poem aspire beyond the limits of Cowper's vision? What was the Excursion and why is it important? How is Wordsworth's poetry 'transformative'? What was particular about Keats's Imagination? How can Blake be said to have had the first theory of Imagination?

Jonathan Wordsworth was Professor of English Literature at St. Catherine's College Oxford. He was an acknowledged international expert on British Romanticism. He was Chairman then President of the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere and Director of the Wordsworth Summer Conference and Wordsworth Winter School. He wrote 'The Music of Humanity' (1969) and 'Borders of Vision' (1982), both studies of Wordsworth. He was a scrupulous editor and among his many publications are 'The Prelude: the Four Texts' which appeared in 1995 and the many titles of the 'Revolution a Romanticism' series.