English Romantic Poets

A greatest-hits selection from some of the most popular poets in the English language, in a gorgeously-jacketed small hardcover.

William Wordsworth defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and no generation of poets has felt more powerfully than the Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this indispensable volume, Sir Jonathan Bate—prizewinning biographer of Wordsworth, Keats and John Clare—brings together the most loved poems of the age, together with many forgotten gems. Alongside classics such as Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “Frost at Midnight”, the immortal odes of Keats, and generous selections from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude, the reader will rediscover the wit of Byron, the wildness of Blake, the passion of Shelley, a wealth of nature poems by Clare, and the distinctive voices of women Romantics such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Includes poems generations have learned to cherish, such as:

• “The Tyger" by William Blake
• “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night" by Lord Byron
• “Surprised by Joy" by William Wordsworth
• “Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats
• “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Colerdige
• "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• “The Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge