Not normally would one think of poets as political agitators. However the best of them were, are, but usually just in their early careers. The English Romantic Poets who died young, such as Shelley and Byron will always be remembered as great poets who wrote line after line of how things ought to be; they were dreamers who dreamed of a better political state. The ones such as Wordsworth and Southey who lived on through their middle years, did not continue to hold the revolutionary views of their youth. This volume concerns itself not so much with their poetry as it does with the lives of the early 19th century literary giants: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Hunt, Keats, Southey and Byron.
Just flip through the index and see how broadly Mr. Landry deals with his subject; and how he has interrelated the lives and works of these famous poetic men. The historical background and the engraved portraitures are worth the price alone. Just read this book and then try not to bring up, at your next dinner party, the subject of the life, loves and poems of William Wordsworth, or of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or of Percy Bysshe Shelley, or of Leigh Hunt, or of John Keats, or of Robert Southey, or of Lord Byron.