This is a book about Romantic poetry written in Britain from the 1780s to the1830s. By the middle of this period many readers of poetry, and many poetsthemselves, felt that theirs was a time when poetry had grown great again,comparable to the age of Shakespeare and Spenser two centuries earlier. As Keatsstated it in the opening line of one of his sonnets (1817), “Greatspirits now on earth are sojourning.” Today, after two more centuries,most of those who care about poetry would agree. The most often anthologizedpoem in English, William Blake’s “The Tyger,” comes fromthis time (1794), and so do many of the most often quoted poetic passages:“Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink”;“I wandered lonely as a cloud”; “O my luve’s like ared, red rose”; “She walks in beauty, like the night / Ofcloudless climes and starry skies”; “Hail to thee, blithespirit”; “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” To some it feelsas if poetry is Romantic poetry, while the prevalent caricatureof “the poet” today is of someone impractical, bohemian,otherworldly, visionary, and young, that is, a “Romantic.”