This chapter discusses onomatopoeia as an ancient poetic device for representing bird and animal calls that in the 1830s was repurposed for science by inclusion in field guides as an aid to identifying bird species. The poetic tradition of representing animal utterances by onomatopoeia makes a contrast with another tradition in which animals are endowed with speech. The chapter considers the place of both traditions in British Romanticism and concludes by arguing that the incorporation of animal utterance into poetry is figured by Keats and others as transforming animals into food.

Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden both saw action and survived into the late twentieth century as successful men of letters whose styles were quite different. This chapter looks at their literary friendship and compares their work, clarifying where they stand in relation to the Georgians and other war poets, while putting them in a broader cultural perspective. It shows how experience of the trenches led them to twist traditional forms, and examines the stylistic and personal challenges they faced as survivors, their writings ever more retrospective. It argues that Blunden’s complexpoetry may feel archaic but has Modernist elements and has been unjustly neglected by comparison with Sassoon’s more accessible but less subtle verse. With close analysis and comparison, and some redefining of key texts, the chapter emphasises their contrasting approaches: Blunden the troubled pastoralist, exploring profounder shades of meaning; Sassoon deliberately ‘anti-poetic’, but with satirical designs on us.

Chapter 5 considers ecphrasis less as an anxious competition between visual and verbal arts than as another form of sociable relations between persons and things. The chapter looks especially at collections by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“Sonnets for Picture”) and the two women poet-lovers who wrote together as Michael Field, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Sight and Song). Following the example of Keats, these poets used grammatical questions (whose ecphrastic uses go back to classical epigrams and idylls) to structure their encounters with works of visual art. Embodying vision in both conversational syntax and poetic (and sometimes typographic) form served their larger efforts to restructure social and sexual relations in the politically charged moment of 1848 (for Rossetti) and at the end of the century (for Michael Field). They sought to draw works of art out of commodity relations and into something that looked like conversation, repersonalizing and reimagining the forms of sociability in which objects and persons might participate.

Chapter 2 focuses on the idylls of Tennyson and Landor as they explored in verse the conversations of friendship, responding to the difficulties of social relations with other beings by figuring and configuring voices other than themselves to put them – and their readers -- in dialogue with one another. Romantic and Victorian poets turned to the example of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus, whose poetic fictions of conversation and song helped the later poets to imagine something like a Levinasian ethical social order amid political disorder. Following Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, Tennyson’s English Idyls and Landor’s Hellenic Idylls took up the ethical and political challenges of conversing across deepening divisions they perceived around them, not only between persons but also between persons and the non-human natural world. Implicit in their efforts is an optimism that later poets, not least an older Tennyson, would find difficult to sustain.

At first glance, Byron and Keats make an unlikely pair. Keats dismissed Byron as being merely interested in cutting a figure and pinned his literary success to the advantages of being six feet tall and a lord, while Byron disdained ‘that little dirty blackguard KEATES’ and snobbishly suggested he was spoiled by ‘Cockneyfying & Suburbing’ (BLJ, VII. 229; VIII. 102). The one was a middle-class poet who died young with little fanfare and a relatively slim output of published work. The other was a nobleman, a world-famous celebrity, with a prolific output of bestselling poems. But what might we learn about each poet by thinking about them together? And what might their pairing tell us about Romanticism more broadly?

All the more telling for being an arbitrary and often intimate historical record, poetry provides the primary source for this chapter’s account of nineteenth-century medicine. Poems by John Gibson, Thomas Fessenden, George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, and Humphrey Davy disclose that the practice of medicine, whether by quacks or the learned, was so ineffectual at the start of the century as to allow the Romantics to plausibly argue for the curative effects of poetry and the imagination, both of which became integral to a new science of life. The professional medicine that sprang from this science, however, asserted its autonomy from poetry, most effectively by pathologising such poets as John Keats and Oscar Wilde, who in turn offered their own verse ripostes. Its positivism and ‘hands-on’ diagnostics yielded new conceptions of the body and touch that Alfred Tennyson, G. M. Hopkins, and Walt Whitman each reflect upon in their poetry. Finally, the growing acceptance of the germ theory of disease enabled pathologies of art as illness that are variously elaborated upon and joked about by Edward Lear, Henry Savile Clerk, Wilde, and Ronald Ross, who also reaches for poetry to record his sublimely momentous discovery of the malaria pathogen in 1896.

Although we tend to separate aesthetics from medicine, Romantic culture was deeply invested in the nerves, and in the value of pleasure. Building upon the work of George Rousseau and others, this essay examines the history of medicine and of literature’s shared probing of pleasure and the nerves, using illustrative examples from Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Smith, and Tighe. These connections crop up where we might least expect them, and, hence, I analyze the commonplace book of dermatologist Thomas Bateman and consider how his fascination with the nerves as the organs of pleasure sheds potential light on his copying out of several of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets. My goal is to make it impossible to separate Romantic literature from its nervous body.

The final, two-part chapter treats the arc of Wordsworth’s poetry after 1820 up to his final volume of original poetry, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, in 1842. Treating explicitly the issue of Wordsworth’s age and the issue of the “late Wordsworth,” the first part of this chapter takes up his process of retrospection – looking back at his life – and re-collection – changing, reordering, and recombining his literary corpus. It touches upon the Ecclesiastical Sketches and Yarrow Revisited, And Other Poems.The second part treats “Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837,” an account Wordsworth’s long-delayed tripto Italy. Ironically, during the period of Wordsworth’s life when his poetry strikes us as being the least compelling aesthetically, he was probably at his most persuasive as a force within his own culture and society. Cox shows that the Italian memorials are an opportunity for Wordsworth to assert the power of his poetry in confronting not only a powerful cultural Other in Catholic Italy but also an Other Italy found or invented by Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and particularly Byron, ironically his younger precursors on this ground. Taking up topics from Wordsworth’s relationship to tourism to the religious valence of these last poems, this chapter concludes the overall argument that “late” Wordsworth developed in response to his younger contemporaries.

While written in the 1790s, Wordsworth’s Peter Bell was only published in 1819 as part of his effort to contest the dominance of Scott and Byron in narrative poetry. As contemporary responses make clear, the poem could be read as a rebuke to Byron’s celebration of villain-heroes: what came to be known as Byronic heroes, morally mixed but charismatic men. Wordsworth’s earlier participation in a collective satire on Byron suggests how Peter Bell responds to Byron and helps make sense of the ways in which Byron, Shelley, and Hunt saw the poem as a rejection of their ongoing work. While Wordsworth offered the poem as an example of the ways in which natural experiences can lead to spiritual reform, his turn to a Methodist preacher at the climax of the poem enraged his younger contemporaries, who saw Methodism as a key force in reactionary culture. In Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas and Peter Bell the Third, in Byron’s Don Juan, and in satires and reviews of Peter Bell and related works by Keats, Reynolds, and Hunt we see a collective attempt by the Cockney School to answer the challenge they heard in Peter Bell.

The “Introduction” first challenges conventional notions of influence which construct Wordsworth as a “father” to the younger poets, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. It lays out a model of mutual influence, in which Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo poetry is found to develop in a conversation with his younger contemporaries. It then establishes the intricate personal and poetic ties between Wordsworth and the “second-generation” romantics, recreating Wordsworth’s place in the post-Waterloo literary scene and how it was shaped by the developing struggle between the Lake and Cockney Schools. Our failure to understand how Wordsworth connects with “second-generation” romanticism has distorted models of his later career and created the critical commonplace of the aesthetic failure of “late” Wordsworth. The “Introduction” also supplies an overview of scholarship to date on the later Wordsworth.

The early nineteenth century sees a significant and self-conscious change in the status of the Sonnets. They become the object of serious biographical scrutiny, whilst individual lyrics (particularly Sonnets 64, 98 and 116) are championed by Romantic poets and critics, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. In the Victorian period, the Sonnets become available in a huge range of texts, but their accessibility to young people, women and the working classes creates anxiety. Editors begin to create distance from a biographical interpretation, whilst anthologists carefully circumscribe the Sonnets that they recommend. That said, the question of who Shakespeare loved becomes a significant issue for major Victorian writers, including Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. Whilst these writers focus on individual Sonnets, their work is inevitably judged in the context of the sequence, which was condemned for excessive passion and effeminacy, if not male-male desire explicitly by Henry Hallam. The chapter ends with Oscar Wilde and the ways in which not only his trial, but ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, rendered the Sonnets notorious.

Jane Hedley accounts for Plath’s descriptive and interpretive practice of poems that take art as their subject. Plath’s ekphrastic poems can be seen as interventions in a conversation with canonical predecessors from Keats to Auden, and can be traced not just to her deliberate study of art history, but to the studies she made as a visual artist, before she made the decision in young adulthood to concentrate on writing.