[ book tip by Emily Bullock ] Hurrah – at long last a collection of Romantic Poetry that actually includes female poets. I remember being rather confounded during my university days that all the Romantic Poets were men. I was sure there were women out there even in the Nineteenth Century. It took a good few years but finally someone produced a comprehensive collection. I love it when the literary canon opens its eyes occasionally, rather too rarely, and realises that it isn’t just white, middle class men out there writing.

The voices of poets such as Anna Barbauld range from the militant ‘Rights of Women’ to the more domestic ‘Washing Day’. But it isn’t just the women poets who get a turn. The anthology orders poets according to their date of birth which might seem a little strange but it works quite cleverly to show the particular sets of cultural and historical influences that come into play for each poet. The reproductions are also photographic which shows original type faces and spellings etc. In addition, there are prose passages with extracts from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry.

This is the perfect anthology of Romantic Writings if you are looking to gain a broad understanding of the work produced and an insight into the era. There is also a rather apt wintery feel to many of the poems. There’s nothing like a ‘Frost at Midnight’ by Coleridge or his poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ to make you reach for another jumper.

[ book info ] Owens & Johnson, W.R. & Hamish: Romantic Writings: An Anthology. (Book language: English) The Open University, England, 2006 (1998). ISBN: 0749287632.