One of the deans of literary criticism in America, M. H. Abrams is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of two landmark books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, and general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. This volume collects the essays, written over three decades, which—together with his books—testify to his preeminence. The essays examine Wordsworth's and Coleridge's innovations in their theories about the language of poetry; the prevalence, sources, and significance of a key Romantic image, the “correspondent breeze”; the pervasive revolutionary spirit of Romanticism; the defining characteristics and chief exemplars of the most distinctive poetic genre of the age, the “greater Romantic lyric”; the relation of Coleridge and Wordsworth to modernist poetics and literature; the philosophic and scientific backgrounds of Coleridge's thinking; and the numerous manifestations of apocalypticism in the Romantic period.

''A sonnet is a moment's monument, '' said Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a sonnet about sonnets. The sonnets in this collection - whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair or celebration - reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines. Here are classics such as Milton's ''On His Blindness'', Yeats's ''Leda and the Swan'' and Frost's ''The Oven Bird'', juxtaposed with the mischievous wit of Rupert Brooke's ''Sonnet Reversed'', the lyric defiance of Mona Van Duyn's ''Caring for Surfaces'' and the comic poignancy of Philip Larkin's ''To Failure''. From the lovelorn laments of Dante and Petrarch to the artful heights of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, from the masterpieces of Wordsworth and Keats to the innovations of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens and James Merrill, the sonnet has proved both versatile and enduring. This delightful anthology displays the incredible range and power of the verse form that has inspired poets across the centuries.

In her book The Regenerate Lyric, Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted historical account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the majority opinion that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favor of a secular, Romantic approach. She contends that Emerson's reinvention of the religion as a species of poetry is tested and found wanting by the very poetic innovators whom Emerson addressed and that a counter-tradition is evident in his major heirs--Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Stevens, Frost, and Lowell. Indeed, Emerson's own poetry failed in many ways to live up to his views and instead revealed an inherent paradox: that coopting of religion by a poetic theory alienates religion from its life principle--theology--and disables the poem as well.