The living pantheon of poets in 1820 21 Byron, Don Juan, in The Complete Poetic Works, ed Jerome J McGann, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vol v 22 Wordsworth, letter to Henry Crabbe Robinson, late January 1820, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed Ernest de Selincourt, vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), vol ii, p 579 23 See The Sceptic: A Hemans–Byron Dialogue, ed Nanora Sweet and Barbara Taylor: www.rc.umd.edu/editions/sceptic 24 Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed Leslie A Marchand, 11 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–9), vol vii, pp 113–14 25 Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1873), ch 26 Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed P P Howe, 21 vols (London: J M Dent, 1930–4), vol xi, p 191 27 See, e.g., Nicholas Roe on “To Autumn,” in John Keats and the Poetry of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp 253–65 28 See Ann Rowland, “Romantic poetry and the novel,” in this volume 29 On Keats’s striking language see Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); William Keach, “Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (Summer 1986), pp 182–96; Marjorie Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Jerome J McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp 17–65 30 See Jeffrey N Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp 146–86 31 Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p 747 32 On Wordsworth’s statement, see Rowland, “Romantic poetry and the novel,” below, pp 120–1; and Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, pp 90–126 While it is true that Wordsworth attacks “frantic,” “sickly,” “stupid,” “idle,” and “extravagant” versions of these genres rather than necessarily the genres themselves, this passage has often been read as a defense of the lyric against narrative and dramatic forms in ways that would shape various constructions of Romanticism 33 Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p 150 34 Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, pp 164–5 35 McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, p 53 FURTHER READING Fraistat, Neil, The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) Mandell, Laura, and Michael Gamer, “The Canon and the Net,” Special issue of Romanticism on the Net 10 (May 1998) McGann, Jerome, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Mellor, Anne, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 33 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008