Romantic poetry and the romantic novel poetry For Shelley, “the distinction between poets and prose writers” can now be dismissed as simply a “vulgar error.”18 In gathering together the words and phrases Romantic-period writers used to represent poetry and the novel, we are arguably tracing the emergence of our modern conception of “Literature,” a category of writing that narrowed over these years to mean, in Clifford Siskin’s words, “special kinds of deeply imaginative writing.”19 What qualified as the depths or heights of this writing, what sort of subjectivity or character it supported, how it mapped feeling on to personal memory and national, cultural forms, emerged not in poetry alone, or in the novel alone, but in their various acts of mutual poaching and appropriation Poetry laid claims beyond the borders of versification by staking out the sentimental grounds of the novel, while the novel redescribed its ambitions through a rhetoric of poetry and “poetical” writing If “Literature” was “invented” in these years, it was largely a product of the elision of formal distinctions between poetry and prose, poetry and the novel Traditional forms and genres did not disappear, but their cultural value changed Many Romantic writers championed those literary productions that seemed to elude or slip free of the “artificial” constraints of genre, meter, and other literary conventions In his “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” of 1815, Wordsworth conveys his contempt for the poets featured in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets by dismissing them simply as “metrical writers.” In a 1796 essay entitled “Is Verse Essential to Poetry?,” William Enfield describes versification as “artificial” and “mechanical,” a literary “charm” or “embellishment” by no means essential to “the sublime operation of poetic invention.” Provoking his essay is the “arrogant assumption” of poets who, considering themselves a “privileged order,” inhabit a “consecrated enclosure” and look down upon the “prosemen” as a “vulgar, plebian herd.” Enfield defines poetry in the familiar terms of passion, imagination and sensibility, and he exploits the flexibility of that definition to bring a host of “prose-men,” including novelists, into the ranks of “poetical writers.”20 Popular, national and domestic literature Although collected editions such as Barbauld’s The British Novelists and Scott’s Ballantyne’s Novelists Library suggest that the novel had a recognized and marketable canon by the beginning of the nineteenth century, critical discussions of novels in this period (and the prose-men and women who wrote them) continue to grapple with their “vulgar,” “plebian” or “popular” status “A Collection of Novels,” Barbauld comments, “has a better chance of giving pleasure than of commanding respect.” Promoting novels meant 123 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008