The Eye of the Beholder: How to See the World Like a Romantic Poet

Born out of the French Revolution and its radical faith that a nation could be shaped and altered by the dreams and visions of its people, British Romantic Poetry was founded on a belief that the objects and realities of our world, whether natural or human, are not fixed in stone but can be molded and transformed by the visionary eye of the poet. This key romantic notion-that things are as they are perceived, that the external world is, in part, a projection of the internal mood of the poet-finds its fullest expression in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, and such intimate crisis poems as Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode," Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." -_-_-_- Unlike some books written on Romanticism, which devote many pages to the poets and few pages to their poetry, the focus here is firmly on the poems themselves. The reader is thereby drawn intimately into the life of these poems. A separate bibliographical essay is provided for for each poet listing accessible biographies and critical studies of their work. -_-_-_- "The indomitable Louis Markos has done it again! Whether he is writing on the pagan classics, the Romantics, the Victorians, the Inklings, post-modernism, or modern Christian apologetics, he always cuts through the cant of contemporary fashion with the insightful incisiveness of orthodoxy. In this latest tour de force, he beholds the alluring and deceptive beauty of Romanticism through the unfailing eye of Christian Realism." * * * Joseph Pearce, Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of Literature, Ave Maria University