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.

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

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