"Pre-Romantic Poetry" intervenes powerfully in debates about eighteenth-century writing, Romanticism, and literary history. By arguing that 'preromanticism' exists to patrol the limits of 'romantic' writing the book questions existing approaches to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, and to period-based study more generally. As well as presenting pioneering re-interpretations of poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, "Pre-Romantic Poetry" reads late-eighteenth-century poetry alongside earlier writers (especially Alexander Pope) and later ones (including William Wordsworth and...