Selected Romantic Poetry

The Romantic movement in poetry began to flourish as political and cultural revolutions were sweeping through Europe.

Rejecting the formality of style and subject of the Augustan poets, the Romantics gave voice to sentiments, desires and unconscious feelings in a way that reverberates in the modern mind. The Romantics, in particular Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, expressed a powerful response to the natural world, under threat by mass industrialization, and this informed much of their finest work.

This anthology contains some of the great Romantic poems on that theme and on the subjects of the human spirit, time, love, art and beauty. From the non-conformist poetry of William Blake to the rural verse of John Clare, the haunting imagery of John Keats and the compassionate voice of Wordsworth, this selection illuminates the immense scope of their enduringly popular work.