In this study scholars investigate the meaning of 'life' in British Romantic poetry and poetics -- analyzing the work of Blake, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and others -- to open up new terrain in Romantic poetry's relation to literary theory, the history of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.

Ross Wilson is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His works Subjective Universality in Kant's Aesthetics (Lang) and Theodor Adorno (Routledge) appeared in 2007.

Introduction Ross Wilson Chapter 1: Blake's Spiritual Body Simon Jarvis Chapter 2: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Poetry of Ordinary Life Stefan H. Uhlig Chapter 3: Wordsworth and the Life of a Subject Richard Eldridge Chapter 4: The Romantic Life of the Self Paul Hamilton Chapter 5: Fragments of an Interrupted Life: Keats, Blanchot, and the Gift of Death David Ferris Chapter 6: Poetry as Reanimation in Shelley Ross Wilson Chapter 7: The Profligate Catalogue: Don Juan, Don Giovanni, and the Reproduction of Life Corinna Russell Chapter 8: Afternach: Life's Posthumous Life in Later-Modernist American Poetry Robert Kaufman