The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry

Feb 24, 2026 4:53 PM

Author:Jonathan Wordsworth

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

Reviews

The Jane Austen of our time

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Intense, elegant, despairing prose...deeply affecting

—— Guardian

A transcendentally harmonious and compassionate work

—— Times Literary Supplement

A surprisingly tender book... Amid the terror a classic story about love sneaks through: love lost, love imagined, love morphed into madness

—— New York Times Book Review

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Riveting... Spare, taut, and pristinely clear prose... An uncanny knack for making moral tension palpable... Extraordinarily moving

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A novel very much in the tradition of Albert Camus, not only in its humanism and concern with the consequences of individual choices but also in its determination to bear witness to the absurdities of daily life... [A] chilling portrait of fundamentalism run amok and its fallout on ordinary people

—— New York Times

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