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j e f f r e y n c ox their contemporaries and that continue to intrigue us Of course, the presence of distinctly experimental verse points to the fact that much poetry in the period followed more conventional models or perhaps turned to roads not taken in the development of British literature What we must remember is that the poetic field at the time was much larger than any canon we have yet assembled, and that Romanticism, while grounded in the work of the period and descriptive of its most challenging verse, is our creation, so that period labels such as “Laker” or “Cockney” serve to define fault lines within Romanticism even as we seek to separate the “Romantic” from other kinds of writing of the day Stuart Curran has called 1820 “the highwater mark for verse in the Romantic period,”2 and indeed, with the publication of distinctive volumes by Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Hemans, it is perhaps as key to our sense of Romanticism in its closing years as is 1798, with its publication of Lyrical Ballads, to our conception of the initial phase of Romantic poetry The year 1820 also provides a point of entry into the story of the construction of Romanticism, as we can see how a quite broad field of varying kinds of poetry came to be defined by the work of a few favored writers, not necessarily recognized as central at the time or as members of a coherent movement, with this narrowing being corrected only in part when recently, the canon of the “Big Six” has been expanded to include other writers active in 1820, particularly women As we turn to 1820’s “pantheon of living poets,” we should be alive to those poets who mattered to those living in 1820, to those poets who continue to live for readers and writers today, and simply to those poets who lived and wrote at the time The term “pantheon,” taken from a temple to all the gods in Rome, was most often used in the period to refer to encyclopedic accounts of the Greek and Roman (or Hindu, Chinese, or Egyptian) gods or to buildings modeled on the Pantheon, such as a place of entertainment with that name in London, or the Panth´eon in Paris, which, with its memorials to the recently dead heroes of the Revolution, provides a model of a gathering of illustrious contemporaries This attempt to reconstruct a poetic pantheon frames writing in a way different than efforts to define either a limited or an expanded canon, for a “heathen” pantheon, unlike a “sacred” canon, seeks to include all the “gods” of poetry, no matter how minor, how disparate, how heterodox England (and its poetry) in 1820 The year 1820 is not a “hot” date It is not 1789, which opened the revolutionary era, or 1815, with Napoleon’s return for the Hundred Days and Waterloo, or 1819, when widespread discontent and demands for Reform 12 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
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