The great Romantics poets are featured in this anthology - William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Clare - as well as many lesser-known women poets.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION
The Romantic poets wrote some of the greatest nature poetry in world literature, as the poems collected here demonstrate. Coleridge's poetry, for instance, was very sensitive to weather; his depressions would either result in rheumatism or poetry. Much of Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold' was concerned with lyrical descriptions of exotic landscapes. The elemental powers of nature are very much to the fore in poems such as William Cowper's 'To the Nightingale', Charlotte Smith's 'To the South Downs' and 'Beachy Head', William Blake's 'Night', Mary Robinson's 'Written After Successive Nights of Melancholy Dream', Helen Maria Williams' 'Sonnet: To the Torrid Zone', Barbara Hoole's Ullswater sonnet, much of the poetry of John Clare and Emily Brontë, and of course the king of Romantic nature poetry, William Wordsworth (in poems such as 'Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey', 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', 'I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud' and of course 'The Prelude').
