Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was a prolific writer whose independence of outlook marks her out as a strikingly modern figure. Her poetry was admired by Wordsworth, and although her work was later neglected, she is now being recognised as a major poet...

Charles Lamb (1775-1834), essayist, poet, humorist, critic, letterwriter and friend, has an enduring literary reputation. His early "Tales from Shakespeare" (1807), written in collaboration with his sister Mary, and "Specimens of English Dramatic Poe...

Asked what problems most perplexed 'young men at present' Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) replied "a growing sense of discrepancy". His wry, wise poetry explores the tensions of a time of radical changes in the religious, political and literary landsc...

In this selection, which includes the finest of the short poems and extracts from the longer ones, there is ample evidence of the quality of Cowper's faith and of his eye and ear. There are also indications of how his life, in many ways, tragic and u...

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) published thirteen volumes of poetry between 1893 and 1936, crucial transitional years in the evolution of modern poetry. His early poems were written under the shadow of the Rossettis, Swinburne and William Morris, but Fo...

John Skelton (1464?-1529) is the first great modern English poet. Immensely proud of his poetic calling, he celebrates in his poems the language itself, in all its richness. He wrote in a vigorous vernacular, taking literary English out of the mediev...

Between 1909 and his death in 1917, T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) published works that contributed to, and often defined, the major debates of Modernism. A poet, critic and philosopher, Hulme championed new artists and explored new philosophical attitudes,...

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a prolific, versatile and engaging writer. He outlived many of the poets and essayists of his generation whose reputations overshadowed his, but Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats all owed a debt to his advocacy, as d...

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. He was a champion of the French Symbolists. Yeats,...

Out of sight of the heated land Over the breezy sea; Into the reach of the solemn mist Quietly drifted we. Her return will be an event welcomed by poetry aficionados everywhere.