Richard Cronin is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE: THE YEARS OF THE REVOLUTION Introduction (Religious Musings) Erasmus Darwin: from the Bastille to Birmingham William Blake and Revolutionary Prophecy The English Jacobins PART TWO: THE WAR AGAINST NAPOLEON Introduction (The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo) Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy Wordsworth at War Mapping Childe Harold I and II PART THREE: ENGLAND IN 1819 Introduction (Peter Bell the Third) Asleep in Italy: Byron and Shelley in 1819 Leigh Hunt, Keats, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry Notes Index

In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language, and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.