This anthology surveys Britain's golden years of poetry--the "long" nineteenth century. College students are introduced to the most frequently studied poems of

Freneau to Whitman.

Poetry occupied a complex position in the social life of nineteenth-century America. While some readers found in poems a resource for aesthetic pleasure and the

'Poetry will no longer keep in time with action; it will be ahead of it.' Arthur Rimbaud The active and colourful lives of the poets of nineteenth-century Franc