Fiona Stafford 
Reading Romantic Poetry 

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

* 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

Table of Content

Preface vii

1 The Pleasures of Poetry 1

2 Solitude and Sociability 34

3 Common Concerns and Cultural Connections 65

4 Traditions and Transformations: Poets as Readers 95

5 Reading or Listening? Romantic Voices 132

6 Sweet Sounds 162

7 Poems on Pages 193

References 227

Index 230

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.