Product Review

English Romantic poetry from its beginnings and its flowering to the first signs of its decadence

Nearly all the famous piéces de résistance will be found here—"Intimations of Immortality," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Tyger," excerpts from Don Juan—s well as some less familiar poems. As muchas possible, the poets are arranged in chronological order, and their poems in order of composition, beginning with eighteenth-century precursors such as Gray, Cowper, Burns, and Chatterton. Naturally, most space has been given over to the major Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Clare, and Keats—although their successors, poets such as Beddoes and Poe, are included, too, as well as early poems by Tennyson and Browning. In an excellent introduction, David Wright discusses the Romantics as a historical phenomenon, and points out their central ideals and themes.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.