The Portable Romantic Poets (Viking Portable Library)

In the late eighteenth century, enthralled by revolutions in America and France, a group of poets discovered a new subject that they would explore - and exalt - well into the next century. The subject was the self and its perceptions, the enveloping consciousness that only human beings are blessed or cursed with. The poets were the Romantics, and they created not just an enduring body of work but a new definition of poetry. This volume presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, John Keats, and others. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image - and miraculously succeeding. 540 pages.