The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. The books provide an analytical and historical framework for understanding their subjects. In this introduction to Wordworth's work, Andrew Keanie explores the poet's politics, his relationship with his sister Dorothy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as well as his synthesis of poetry and philosophy, his startlingly modern strategy of image-building and quest for literary immortality. Keanie sifts through Wordworth's vast output to select those poems of enduring meaning, making clear his achievements.

The author argues that in order to appreciate the extraordinary application and industry of Wordsworth, one does not need to risk forgetting the extraordinariness of Coleridge's bursts of creativity and, in order to appreciate Coleridge, one does not need to simultaneously react against a 'dull', 'dutiful' Wordsworth. The book is divided into two parts to acknowledge the dichotomy between the methodologies of Wordsworth and Coleridge - one efficient the other inefficient. In the opinion of many, each was the other's most reliable and powerful source of creative inspiration.

Study of his achievements as a poet and satirist.

The purpose of this series is to promote the study of writing in the English language through the introduction of the major figures writing in English throughout the ages. They provide an analytical and historical framework for understanding their subjects. Samuel Taylor Coleridge has a special place in literature. Intrigued by metaphysics and science, he also produced some of the most beautiful lyrics of the Romantic period. So sweeping was his need to know - everything - he is often accused by his critics of losing sight of the particular, or failing his incredible poetic and critical gifts. Even so, Coleridge produced the "Biographia Literaria" - a key text in understanding Romanticism. His criticism of Shakespeare's work has founded modern Shakespearean studies. A sympathetic account of Coleridge's troubled life - his difficult marriage, his addiction to opium and his famed "inefficiency" - this student guide draws attention to the vast endeavour of his intellectual and artistic work, enabling the reader to understand this most beguiling and paradoxical figure.

Having identified him as a sort of semi-educated little cockney chancer, Keats's contemporary reviewers savaged him in the pages of Britain's most influential magazines. High ambition, unaccompanied by high birth, and radical affiliations and liberal inclinations, made him an object of contempt to those of, or aping the opinions of, the literary Establishment. In the short term, he never stood a chance. Long after his death, his reputation was eventually brightened by much more enthusiastic - if, as some have since argued, misguided - appreciations for his beautiful and powerful otherworldliness. Later still, in reaction to Keats-lovers' gushing admiration, a much more worldly Keats has been written up - including some bracing insights that seem to owe something to his first reviewers. As Martin Seymour-Smith has said, 'Many privately regard [Keats] with a condescension that is more smug than they would like to admit'. This largely text-focused study promotes the best energies of a more Romantic view of a key Romantic figure. Keats was inspired and ill. By the time of his death, his genius and tuberculosis had pressurised him into poetry. The best he had to offer - including searching and scintillating confidences concerning how to live one's life in this world of suffering, 'the Vale of Soul-making' - are more accessible to the reader with a taste for poetry than they are to the consumer of ideologically appropriate journalism or ostentatiously unemotional academic analyses.