Romantic Poets: William Blake to Edgar Allan Poe

xvii, [1], 461, [1] pp. 8vo. Brown leather spine, brown cloth boards, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, brown ribbon marker bound in. A collection of verse from various poets, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, and illustrated by Eugene Karlin. Includes poems by: William Blake; Robert Burns; George Crabbe; Philip Freneau; Fitz-Greene Halleck; Sir Walter Scott; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; William Wordsworth; Hartley Coleridge; William Cullen Bryant; Walter Savage Landor; Thomas Moore; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; George Darley; John Keats; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Hood; Winthrop Mackworth Praed; John Clare; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; William Barnes; John Greenleaf Whittier; Jones Very; Thomas Lovell Beddoes; Edgar Allan Poe. "In the late eighteenth century, enthralled by revolutions in America and France, a group of poets discovered a new subject that they would explore--and exalt--well into the next century. The subject was the self and its perceptions, the enveloping consciousness that only human beings are blessed--or cursed--with. The poets were the Romantics, and they created not just an enduring body of work but a new definition of poetry and a radical new sense of the poetic mission: in Shelley's words, to be "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."