Reading Romantic Poetry - (Wiley Blackwell Reading Poetry) by Fiona Stafford (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

• 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

From the Back Cover

"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

"A splendid volume which anyone teaching Romantic poetry would want to read and want their students to read." Michael O'Neill, Durham University

"A wonderful introduction to the subject by one of Britain's foremost readers and critics of Romantic poetry." Jon Mee, University of Warwick

Coleridge argued that the most powerful poems were those "to which we return with the greatest pleasure." Reading Romantic Poetry demonstrates, through careful critical analysis, the ways in which the rich poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can speak directly to modern audiences.

The book introduces readers, often for the first time, to the pleasure of reading Romantic poetry. The famous poets of the period are included: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Burns, and Clare - together with a host of less familiar writers, such as the women poets Smith, Yearsley, Barbauld, More, and Hemans.

Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, the key poems and players, as well as the crucial literary circles and influences of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare, and political crisis.

Review Quotes

"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)

About the Author

Fiona Stafford is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She has published on a wide range of Romantic literature, and is especially interested in the literary relationships between England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. She has written several books including Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (2010) and Brief Lives: Jane Austen (2008), and has edited Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (2013), as well as novels by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.