The living pantheon of poets in 1820 1780–1830 (1996), we have in turn lost sight of the “minor,” popular male British writers of the day.1 Our focus on a group of writers whom we have united under the banner of “Romanticism” – whether it involves only a few male poets or a broader gathering including women – can seem odd to those interested in other eras While most periods are named for relatively neutral language features (Anglo-Saxon), rulers (Elizabeth or Victoria), or temporal aspects (modern or postmodern), the Romantic period is named for a particular trend in poetry, retrospectively applied It is as if we would call the period of early modern English literature “metaphysical,” using Dr Johnson’s later term for a particular group of poets to define all the work of that era While we now conceive of the poetry between roughly 1789 and 1832 as part of a unified “Romanticism,” at the time the poets we identify with Romanticism were grouped in a series of often opposing schools: for example, the Bluestocking circle of artistic and intellectual women who gathered in the second half of the eighteenth century; the Della Cruscans, who followed their leader Robert Merry in offering highly wrought and politically controversial poetry; the Lake School of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; the Cockney School of London intellectuals and artists, including Keats, Shelley, and Hazlitt, that centered on Leigh Hunt; or the Satanic School, Southey’s derogatory name for the partnership of Byron and Shelley Of course, Blake, so central to our sense of Romanticism now, stood apart not only from these schools but from the literary scene as a whole, though his engagement with the literature of the day is seen, for example, in his responses to Wordsworth and Byron Not that “Romanticism” should be discarded as a period term: it describes a body of experimental work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that points to larger trends in poetry beyond its confines “Romanticism” enables us to gather together a group of poets who responded to a common moment of massive cultural, social, and political change with varying attempts to remake poetry and re-vision their world As poetic innovators seeking to remake the world through their art, they both opened up the forms of poetry – think of Wordsworth’s exploration of “lyrical ballads,” Blake’s turn to fourteeners or his dissent from the very means of literary production, the work on the sonnet of Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, and Keats, or Hunt’s assault upon the heroic couplet that would influence Shelley and Keats – and opened poetry upon the world, as they sought an art that could, like Keats’s god of poetry, Apollo, in “Hyperion,” “die into life,” that is, leave behind the confines of art to build or remake the human community While Wordsworth and Blake, Scott and Shelley, Byron and Hemans engaged in different kinds of aesthetic experiments for differing purposes, they all sought to make poetry new in ways that both impressed and puzzled 11 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008