The English Romantics

by Peter Landry (Halifax)

The subjects dealt with in this book, are the lives and times of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Robert Southey and Lord Byron.

The Romantic label, as far as British literature is concerned, is to be pinned to only a thirty-nine year period. We may well mark the beginning of the Romantic period with the year 1793, the year that William Godwin brought out his work, Political Justice. Beyond this year we see, finally, regular people reading about and speaking about great topics such as democracy and government. This Romantic movement, though considerably dampened by the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), continued throughout the first quarter of the 19th-century …