RICHARD CRONIN is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he has taught since 1973. He is currently Head of Department. His previous books, all published by Macmillan, are Shelley's Poetic Thoughts, Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Imagining India, and 1798: The Years of the Lyrical Ballads.

He is a master of his subject, and his book is the most ground-breaking critique of the Romantic movement to have appeared... Times Literary Supplement (UK)

• Contents Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE: THE YEARS OF THE REVOLUTION Introduction (Religious Musings) Erasmus Darwin: from the Bastille to Birmingham William Blake and Revolutionary Prophecy The English Jacobins PART TWO: THE WAR AGAINST NAPOLEON Introduction (The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo) Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy Wordsworth at War Mapping Childe Harold I and II PART THREE: ENGLAND IN 1819 Introduction (Peter Bell the Third) Asleep in Italy: Byron and Shelley in 1819 Leigh Hunt, Keats, and the Politics of Cockney Poetry Notes Index