The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost offers a new critical insight into the relationship between Milton and the Romantic poets. Shears devotes a chapter to each of the six major Romantics, contextualizing their 'misreadings' of Milton's Paradise Lost within a range of historical, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts. Shears argues that the Romantic inclination towards fragmentation and a polysemous aesthetic leads to disrupted readings of Paradise Lost that obscure the theme, or warp the 'grain', of the poem.

Jonathon Shears is a lecturer in English at Keele University, UK.

Contents: The romantic legacy of Paradise Lost: an introduction; Milton in the 18th century; Blake; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Interchapter; exploring the metaphor; Byron; Shelley; Keats; Milton in the 20th century; Bibliography; Index.