Charles Mahoney 
A Companion to Romantic Poetry 

Through a series of 34 essays by leading and emerging scholars,
A Companion to Romantic Poetry reveals the rich diversity of
Romantic poetry and shows why it continues to hold such a vital and
indispensable place in the history of English literature.

* Breaking free from the boundaries of the traditionally-studied
authors, the collection takes a revitalized approach to the field
and brings together some of the most exciting work being done at
the present time

* Emphasizes poetic form and technique rather than a biographical
approach

* Features essays on production and distribution and the
different schools and movements of Romantic Poetry

* Introduces contemporary contexts and perspectives, as well as
the issues and debates that continue to drive scholarship in the
field

* Presents the most comprehensive and compelling collection of
essays on British Romantic poetry currently available

Table of Content

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction 1
Charles Mahoney

Part I Forms and Genres 7

1 Mournful Ditties and Merry Measures: Feeling and Form in the Romantic Short Lyric and Song 9
Michael O’Neill

2 Archaist-Innovators: The Couplet from Churchill to Browning25
Simon Jarvis

3 The Temptations of Tercets 44
Charles Mahoney

4 To Scorn or To ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ 62
Daniel Robinson

5 Ballad Collection and Lyric Collectives 78
Steve Newman

6 Satire, Subjectivity, and Acknowledgment 95
William Flesch

7 ‘Stirring shades’: The Romantic Ode and Its Afterlives 107
Esther Schor

8 Pastures New and Old: The Romantic Afterlife of Pastoral Elegy123
Christopher R. Miller

9 The Romantic Georgic and the Work of Writing 140
Tim Burke

10 Shepherding Culture and the Romantic Pastoral 159
John Bugg

11 Ear and Eye: Counteracting Senses in Loco-descriptive Poetry176
Adam Potkay

Part II Production and Distribution, Schools and Movements195

12 ‘Other voices speak’: The Poetic Conversations of Byron and Shelley 197
Simon Bainbridge

13 The Thrush in the Theater: Keats and Hazlitt at the Surrey Institution 217
Sarah M. Zimmerman

14 Laboring-Class Poetry in the Romantic Era 234
Michael Scrivener

15 Celtic Romantic Poetry: Scotland, Ireland, Wales 251
Jane Moore

16 Anglo-Jewish Romantic Poetry 268
Karen Weisman

17 Leigh Hunt’s Cockney Canon: Sociability and Subversionfrom Homer to Hyperion 285
Michael Tomko

18 Poetry, Conversation, Community: Annus Mirabilis, 1797-1798 302
Emily Sun

Part III Contemporary Contexts and Perspectives 319

19 Spontaneity, Immediacy, and Improvisation in Romantic Poetry321
Angela Esterhammer

20 Celebrity, Gender, and the Death of the Poet: The Mystery of Letitia Elizabeth Landon 337
Ghislaine Mc Dayter

21 Poetry and Illustration: ‘Amicable strife’354
Sophie Thomas

22 Romanticism, Sport, and Late Georgian Poetry 374
John Strachan

23 ‘The science of feelings’: Wordsworth’s Experimental Poetry 393
Ross Hamilton

24 Romanticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism 412
Laura Quinney

25 Milton and the Romantics 425
Gordon Teskey

Part IV Critical Issues and Current Debates 443

26 ‘The feel of not to feel it, ‘ or the Pleasures of Enduring Form 445
Anne-Lise François

27 Romantic Poetry and Literary Theory: The Case of ‘Aslumber did my spirit seal’ 467
Marc Redfield

28 ‘Strange utterance’: The (Un)Natural Language ofthe Sublime in Wordsworth’s Prelude 483
Timothy Bahti

29 The Matter of Genre in the Romantic Sublime 503
Ian Balfour

30 Sexual Politics and the Performance of Gender in Romantic Poetry 521
James Najarian

31 Blake’s Jerusalem: Friendship with Albion 538
Karen Swann

32 The World without Us: Romanticism, Environmentalism, and Imagining Nature 554
Bridget Keegan

33 Ethical Supernaturalism: The Romanticism of Wordsworth, Heaney, and Lacan 572
Guinn Batten

34 The Persistence of Romanticism 589
Willard Spiegelman

Index 606

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).