Romantic poetry and the standardization of English aftermath of Babel, for women, all emotions in all cultures can be funneled through Hemans’s English It overflowed the boundaries of Great Britain to encompass universal femininity If the English of late eighteenth-century writers opposed that of the standardizers, that of the Romantic poets ended up in a tense complementarity with it Standardization had on its side the prestige of Great Britain, the precedence of the best authors like Pope and Addison, and huge distribution through textbooks and anthologies, but it also had the drawback of its potential for almost instant obsolescence Romantic poetry, on the other hand, represented the cutting edge of English usage, in part because much of it did not become widely accessible until quite late in the nineteenth century The standard approach to Romantic poetry has been to focus on it as representation: to examine the poets’ treatments of such topics as subjectivity, nature, the imagination, or even language Yet doing so tends to forget that poetry is not just about what it represents: any poem also makes a statement about the possibilities of the language in which it is written For Romantic poets, the uncertainty of these possibilities became the occasion for an often hidden drama that nonetheless lay at the heart of their poetic projects NOTES Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p 295 Thomas Sheridan, Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), facs edn (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), p 206 J Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Context of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: W W Norton, 1990), pp 156–61 John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1791), facs edn (Menston: Scolar Press, 1968), p iii Information on Blair and Murray from William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp 581, 137 Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p 38 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), ed Kathryn J Kirkpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp 225, 236 Samuel Johnson, “Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language” (1755), in Johnson on the English Language, ed Gwin J Kolb and Robert DeMaria, Jr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p 108 John Fell, An Essay Towards an English Grammar (London: C Dilly, 1784), p xi 10 Bertil Sundby, Anne Kari Bjørge, and Kari E Haugland, A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar, 1700–1800 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), p 35 95 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008