Poetic Form and British Romanticism

Across Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, the Romantic age coincided with a large-scale revival of lost literatures and the first attempts to create a coherent history of Western literature. Ranging with assurance across that history, Stuart Curran demonstrates that Romanticism, far from being indifferent or hostile to the received forms of literature as popular caricature has held, was actually obsessed with them as repositories of literary conventions and conveyors of implicit logical of ideological value. Whether in their employment of fixed forms, which resulted in the incomparable artistry of Romantic odes, or in their rethinking of major genres like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance that gave the movement its name, the Romantic poets transformed every element they touched to accord with a democratic, secular and skeptical ethos, a world view recognizably modern in its dimensions.