The Collected Poems of Henry Kirke White Romantic Reconfigurations Studies in Literature and Cult

This book is the first-ever scholarly edition of one of the bestselling and most revered poets in the nineteenth century--a poet excluded from the canon by twentieth-century critics. A poor youth who died early from tuberculosis, Kirke White shaped the popular image of the Romantic artist as a young rebel against convention who is too sensitive to survive in the harsh commercial world. As a prodigy who made his incipient death the subject of his tragic poetry, he was influential on both sides of the Atlantic--on Keats, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Emerson and Bryant. The edition restores his powerful, macabre and prophetic verse to attention, and also demonstrates his variety and range. It includes a comprehensive introduction discussing the creation of his public image, the marketing of his poetry, and the impacts he made on nineteenth-century poetry, on labouring-class writing and on publishing history.