“It is hard to think of a more sensitive manipulation of the major feature that distinguishes these Blackwell anthologies from their direct rivals: the detailed annotations that accompany each author and text. … In O’Neill and Mahoney’s hands, the gloss is as much a prompt or a challenge, as it is a summary or exegesis. The hermeneutic impulse is checked, in favour of a form of attention that occurs more frequently in disciplines such as art history than in literary studies: the patient exposition of technical detail, generic make-up and social context, through which the expressive and the historical are taken to be inseparable…. The form of attention that O’Neill and Mahoney manifest is not only consistent, but also complementary. The former is particularly alert (as the example of Blake suggests) to metrical nuance and to strong ambiguity in a more general sense; the latter, meanwhile, shows a remarkable ear to the many echoes and allusions across and within texts.” (Coleridge Bulletin, 1 June 2014)
“Comprising 625 pages and very nicely produced, it represents good value, and I believe that many of these thirty-four excellent essays will be consulted for years to come . . . It should interest a wide range of scholars and encourage them to find new ways of understanding, questioning, and celebrating its poetic legacy.” (Review 19, 2011)
“With such a variety of content and depth of literary study, The Companion to Romantic Poetry should be of interest to general readers and students seeking an inspiring introduction to the poets of the romantic era, but also more informed scholars looking for a different perspective.” (Reference Reviews, 2011)
“This volume is an excellent resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate study, providing a refreshing take on many conventional areas of Romantic scholarship whilst also introducing a welcome number of new perspectives on this diverse and fascinating literary genre.” (Routledge ABES, 2011)
“Up to date and rich in foundations, this will be useful to students at any level. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.” (Choice, 1 July 2011)
It has never been possible to adequately define either Romanticism or Romantic poetry. There are no uncontested dates with which to delimit the period historically; neither is there an essential set of qualities which makes a poem unequivocally Romantic. Beyond argument, however, is the critical role that Romantic poetry has played and continues to play in evaluations of the achievements of British poetry.
The elusive nature of the period has meant that, historically, the study of Romantic poetry has been organised around just six canonical figures — Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats — and structured in terms of the categories generated by their works alone. Today our sense of both the achievements and the possibilities of Romantic poetry is far more expansive. This collection of 34 provocative new essays attests to the remarkable diversity of the period and encourages us to take a different approach to this body of work by refocusing our attention on the revitalised matters of form, metre, and genre.
About the Author
Charles Mahoney is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author of Romantics and Renegades: The Poetics of Political Reaction (2003), the editor of Leigh Hunt, Later Literary Essays (2003), and co-editor, with Michael O’Neill, of Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
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