The cambridge companion to british roman 38

j e f f r e y n c ox St Clair has argued that during, say, Wordsworth’s lifetime there was as yet no canon of Romantic poetry, as copyright law meant that access to works by living poets, initially printed in small numbers, was quite restricted He does note that there was a canon of contemporary writers recognized for their literary merit – Byron, Campbell, Coleridge, Moore, Rogers, Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth – but he goes on to argue that only a few of these (most importantly, Scott and Byron) had a broad readership, and that this canon of prestige does not include such successful contemporary writers as the “peasant poet” Robert Bloomfield (two of his volumes were reprinted in 1820) and James Montgomery, a popular writer of hymns and author of such works as The Wanderer of Switzerland and other Poems (1806) and Greenland (1819), who had a three-volume edition of his works printed in 1820 While recognizing that there was a contemporary category of “living poets,” St Clair points to the centrality of an “old canon” of major poets from Chaucer to Cowper that, he argues, continued to dominate the reading of most of the populace; and 1820, for example, does see editions of Cowper, Gray, Goldsmith, and Gay from St Clair’s “old canon.” Continued interest in that even older canon, the Greek and Latin classics, is seen in 1820 editions of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Aristophanes, and Anacreon St Clair usefully reminds us of the larger world of poetry in 1820, comprising earlier writers, new “Romantic” writers, and other established, rising, or unsuccessful writers who stood opposed to Romanticism or simply apart from it When readers took up a new volume by Wordsworth or Keats, they read it both alongside earlier writers, so that they might contrast Wordsworth with Pope or compare Keats to Spenser, and against contemporary rivals, so that they might ask whether Wordsworth offered the same pleasures as Bloomfield, the “Farmer Boy,” or whether Keats’s “The Eve of St Agnes” could compete with Montgomery’s “The Vigil of St Mark” (1806) Even when we focus on innovative poetry, we need to recall that, of the “Big Six,” only Byron was a bestselling author and that Scott, Campbell, Hemans, Rogers, and Moore would have had a stronger influence on what most readers considered to be “new” poetry than did Shelley or Coleridge While our sense of Romanticism may follow a line of experimentation in the lyric that leads centrally from Wordsworth through Keats, at the time readers might have focused more on the development of narrative poetry from the widely read Scott, whose massive importance has come to be recognized in recent years,10 to the popular Byron Still, there was a different kind of canon formed by what we might call the “writerly nation,” composed not only of writers themselves but also of reviewers and others actively engaged in commenting on the writing of the day in, for example, letters, journals, and home-made miscellanies such as 16 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008