English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century

This collection gathers the most influential English literary essays written in the nineteenth century, a period when Romantic ideals reshaped the very notion of poetry. The selections illuminate how critics moved beyond the rigid rules of neoclassicism to explore emotion, imagination, and the moral purpose of verse.

Readers will encounter the thoughts of poets and thinkers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Hazlitt, each probing questions of diction, the nature of the poetic hero, and the relationship between art and society. American perspectives, represented by Emerson and Lowell, add a transatlantic dimension to the discussion.

Presented in chronological order, the essays trace the evolution of critical theory from early Romantic manifestos to later Victorian debates about subject choice and the “pathetic fallacy.” Listening to these voices offers a vivid sense of how nineteenth‑century writers argued for poetry’s relevance to everyday life.