The Portable Romantic Poets [Paperback]

W. H. Auden (Editor), Norman Holmes Pearson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 30, 1977

This volume, edited and with a superb introduction by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image—and miraculously succeeding.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

W.H. Auden was born in 1907 and went to Oxford University, where he became Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1960. After the publication of his Poems in 1930, he became the acknowledged leader of the 'thirties poets'. His poetic output was prolific, and he also wrote verse plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, with whom he visited china. In 1946 he became a U.S. citizen. He died in 1973.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (June 30, 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140150528
• ISBN-13: 978-0140150520
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #57,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good selection, co-edited by a poet, August 1, 2002

By 

Darth Vader (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Portable Romantic Poets (Paperback)

One of the annoying things about the received opinion about the Romantic poets is the statement that there were exactly six of them--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley. This pronouncement is usually delivered with equal conviction to assertions you usually hear only in the natural sciences--e.g., that there are three kinds of human muscle (cardiac, striated, and slow-flexing) and two kinds of stony drip-accreted icicles in caves (stalactites and stalagmites). Nor elsewhere in the area of literature do you quite hear that there were so many Russian realist novelists, so many French Symbolist poets, so many English medieval poets, etc. So it's something of a relief to read in the editors' introduction to the "Portable Romantic Poets" that American romantics are included as well, because poets don't just arrest their reading, as anthologizers usually arrest their selecting, at continental or national boundaries. It's also welcome to see the inclusion of poets who are sometimes left out because they might be felt to be minor or unpopular (Landor) or generically different (Burns) by anthologizers. This anthology is a welcome corrective to received wisdom about who actually qualifies as a Romantic. And the efficient introduction is a minor masterpiece of cultural exposition as well.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars nice collection, provides context with poems, April 8, 2000

By 

ltp1 "ltp1" (Manchester, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Portable Romantic Poets (Paperback)

Far be it from me to critique these poets, but I can say something about this particular presentation. It's a handy little volume, with a several-page introduction providing historical context, and a several-page calendar of British and American poetry from 1750 to around 1850. The calendar doesn't just list poetry, it includes events like "Watt's steam engine patented" and "Lewis and Clark Expedition" as well as the publication of novels and music, so context is well established. At the back of the book is an index of poems by title and by first line, and there's a set of biographical notes on the poets.

If you want to know what romantic poetry's all about, take a look at this. I don't know how an English Lit Ph.D. would rate this book but I think it's a nice collection.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The overflow of spontaneous emotion recollected in tranquillity, September 18, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Portable Romantic Poets (Paperback)

The great defining moment of the Romantic movement in English poetry is generally considered the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of 'The Lyrical Ballads' in 1797. But the editors of this anthology take an earlier point of origin and begin with the great myth - master and singer of songs of innocence and experience, William Blake. They include in their anthology not simply English Romantic poets but also the Americans , Emerson and Thoreau( Transcendentalists) and Poe. They also include a number of minor, lesser known poets.

But what is most important is that they have most of the great definining poems of English Romantic Poetry, the great poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats.

There are of course as many definitions of Romanticism as there are of other key intellectual-historical concepts such as 'Nature' and 'Classicism' But one clear element is a new found emphasis on self, and subjectivity , the expression of the individual's feeling of the world. Wordsworth went to everyday life and language, to nature and the world of the ' simple people' he met in his countryside wanderings. Coleridge went to the world of myth and mystery, but they both provided in deeper ways whole worlds of feeling which were at times ' deeper than tears'.

An outstanding anthology of one of the most important 'movements' or ' periods' in the world- history of poetry.