Beers, a Yale professor, traces the romantic impulse in English writing long before Wordsworth and Coleridge. He follows the reaction against Augustan classicism in the Spenserians and Miltonists, the poets of melancholy, the Gothic revival in architecture and fiction, the recovery of old ballads, the Ossian poems and Chatterton, showing how a taste for the wild and medieval grew through the century.
Still a clear guide for students of English literature to the eighteenth-century background of Romanticism. Download the free EPUB.