The English Romantics  (Paperback, KANAV GUPTA)

This edition is chiefly designed with the undergraduate student in mind, although it will prove useful to any serious enthusiast of Romantic poetry. No other period of English history has seen such a prolific and dense literary output as the Romantic period, where within a space of five odd decades from 1780s to 1830s, an entirely new idiom of poetry, new registers of poetic language and indeed a radically different world-view were fashioned by a few individual poets. The range of their subject matter and their way of looking at it far extended what was deemed fit for Poetry in their time, but what they left for posterity in both their poetic works and their prose deliberations on the nature of Poetry and human existence far broadened the limits of both. As such, the poems are of course merely a sample, and by no means even properly representative of the vast individual oeuvres of these prolific poets, but are provided with detailed annotations which try to educate the reader in the major intellectual debates around these poems. Each poet has a section unto himself, where the various secondary readings on his poetry are clubbed together for easy access. There are background readings from socio-political and intellectual contexts in which these poets are situated. The book incorporates a wide array of essays from various schools of thought. From M. H. Abrams's and Geoffrey Hartman's groundbreaking work to post structuralism, new-historicism and more contemporary schools, updated and latest readings like those of Nigel Leask and Charles Rzepka are sampled here. This book will suffice to lead the lay reader to a more intimate understanding of these poets, and the more serious student to the library.