Curran here confronts the popular stereotype that the Romantics either accepted or rejected previously established literary genres. He proposes rather that they adapted traditional poetic forms to suit their own democratic, secular, and sceptical ethos. This artistic merger of traditional genre with the tenets of Romanticism was a fruitful one, not only resulting in the revival of the ode and the sonnet, but also leading to the imaginative rethinking of major forms like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance which gave the movement its name.
