The 1820s and 1830s, the gap between Romanticism and Victorianism,
continues to prove a difficulty for scholars. This book explores and
recovers a neglected culture of poetry in those years, and it
demonstrates that culture was a crucial turning point in literary
history. It explores a uniquely wide range of poets, including the
poetry of the literary annuals, Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Robert
Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Hood and John Clare, placing
their work in the light of new research into the conditions of the
literary market. In turn, it uses that culture to open up wider
theoretical issues relating to literary form, book history, print
culture, gender and periodisation. The period's doubt about poetry's
place in culture and its capacity to last prompted a dazzling range of
creative experiments that reimagined the metrical, material and
commercial forms of poetry.