The cambridge companion to british roman 43

The living pantheon of poets in 1820 and Descriptive Pieces,” “Amatory Pieces,” and “Humorous and Amusing Pieces,” and includes selections from, among others, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, Byron and Moore, Rogers, Crabbe, Wilson, and Campbell, Montgomery and Bloomfield, the playwrights Thomas Dibdin, George Colman the Younger, and Sheridan, and most interestingly Joanna Baillie, Helen Maria Williams, and Mrs Opie (there is also a poem by Ann Cuthbert Knight, from her 1816 Keep-Sake, but it is not ascribed to her) There is then an interesting mix of popular writers, experimental writers, women writers, and dramatists, which suggests again the range of work being produced at the time There are also some largely lost names, such as the interesting polymath and world traveler John Leyden, the Reverend John Mitford, known for his editorial work, and Richard Westall, better known as a painter than as a very minor poet, along with such as yet unidentified figures as Finley and Fitz-Florian Most poets are represented by one or two poems, with even the incredibly popular satirist “Peter Pindar” (the pseudonym of John Wolcot) receiving only one entry Coleridge has three poems in the volume; Wordsworth, Southey, Crabbe, Scott, Rogers, and Campbell are represented by four to seven selections each; Moore has twelve; and Byron has the largest selection with sixteen poems or excerpts Carey samples Byron’s corpus, with a poem from his first volume, Hours of Idleness, passages from the oriental tales and Childe Harold, and excerpts from his new work, Don Juan, edited to de-emphasize the erotic and its most biting social and cultural commentary Wordsworth’s full career is also represented, from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads through The White Doe of Rylstone to The Waggoner, published in 1819, though we not find the Wordsworth poems that most occupy our attention This volume gives us an important map of the field of contemporary poetry in 1820 as seen by someone familiar with a wide range of verse At that moment, Byron was probably the central poet, with Moore, his friend and ally on the left, also commanding a great deal of interest Standing alongside Byron and Moore in this volume but opposed to them in the culture wars of the day were the “Lake Poets,” Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey Montgomery and Bloomfield, identified by St Clair as readers’ favorites, receive less attention than Scott or Crabbe Campbell and Rogers receive more space than in recent anthologies, in a sense occupying a place that would later be given to the younger, less established poets, Keats and Shelley Women writers were at the time recognized as contributing to contemporary poetry as they would not be for most of the twentieth century but are again today; dramatists were seen as part of the world of poetry, with again the drama and theatre disappearing from our sense of the period until quite recently 21 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008