Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous [Hardcover]

Catherine M. Andronik (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2007

Meet the rebellious young poets who brought about a literary revolution

Rock stars may think they invented sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but the Romantic poets truly created the mold.

In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety--or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Cole-ridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language, and their words changed literature forever.

Wildly Romantic is a smart, sexy, and fascinating look at these original bad boys--and girls.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up—Andronik captures the English Romantic poets in all of their scandalous glory. Their notoriously reckless lives, from opium addictions and affairs to quirky obsessions and incest, have long been the stuff of literary legend, but seldom have they been rendered so accessible to teens. In the opening pages, for instance, the poets are set against the backdrop of a push in Europe for equality for the lower classes. This social movement is, in turn, likened to teenage rebellion: "What teenager doesn't want to be free and equal to authority?" The author accomplishes a difficult feat; she pulls readers into the soap opera-esque lives of the writers while skillfully weaving in discussion of the literary tradition and the historical context in which they operated. Each extensively researched chapter begins with narrative focusing on one individual and concludes with several poems, an arrangement that lends itself to contextual analysis. By the book's end, the crisscrossed lives and influences of these figures have been tied tightly together to provide an introduction to their world. Wildly Romantic is a "must have" for high school collections in need of high-interest titles on this period in English literature.—Jill Heritage Maza, Greenwich High School, CT
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

This is not your usual YA literary biography. Weaving together the lives of the groundbreaking Romantic poets--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats--Andronik talks about the revolution they brought to literature. She also describes their often flamboyantly radical lifestyles. Several were drug addicts, promiscuous, out of control. Byron had sex with boys and mistresses, even his half sister. Wordsworth, a passionate revolutionary in his youth, became ultraconservative and believed women should stay home. The open writing style makes reading easy; in fact, sometimes the text gets too chirpy, with contemporary colloquialisms about the upscale, carousing bunch and comparisons to "Hollywood's Star Trail." Best is the casual way Andronik weaves in the many classic poems at the end of each chapter. The rebels' controlled, exquisite lines will speak to teens about the lyrical use of everyday language. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR); First Edition edition (March 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805077839
• ISBN-13: 978-0805077834
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Filled with information, July 7, 2011

By 

Jeri Lyn Flowers "Jflo teaches" (Cartersville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous (Hardcover)

Illustrations:
Portraits of each poet contained in this resource are printed in black and white accompanying each biographical sketch. Occasionally, there is an image of a large, gray plume, presumably from a pen, filling a page between chapters.

Layout of type:
This is a single column layout. The font is simple and well spaced for easy reading. The poems are titled with a contrasting font in all capital letters. The index uses italics to denote pages that have illustrations of the indexed subject.

Chapters:
Introduction
Wordsworth
Esteesi
Lyrical balladeers
A life in ruins
Baby Byron
Young Shelley
Mary Godwin
Byronic entanglements
Byron and Shelley and the girls
Keats
Dead babies
Dead poets
Lives touched
End of an era
Chapter notes
Sources
For further reading and viewing
Index of poems
Index

Features:
The biographies of some of the romance poets are contained in this book, but there is an abundance of additional information about the time period and the relationships of the poets presented. There are two indexes; one of the poems, and one organized alphabetically by subjects.

Assessment:
This is a dependable resource that can be read as one might read a novel, straight through, or used as a reference book.