A collection of essays highlighting the pervasive, yet often unacknowledged, role of Romantic poetry and poetics on modern and contemporary innovative poetry
Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated "late-Romantic” poetry of the nineteenth century. The essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the continuities between Romanticism's poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late-nineteenth-century to the present day.
