This volume contains a fine selection of some of the best verse, accompanied by evocative illustrations, of four of the great Romantic poets: Byron, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. Their writing had a profound influence on English literature - they saw and felt things brilliantly afresh; they rejoiced in a mystical oneness with nature and in individual self-expression; and nostalgia for childhood, unrequited love and the exiled hero were constant themes. Wordsworth led the first generation of Romantic writers with his belief that poetry is the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. The second generation - Byron, Shelley and Keats - absorbed their predecessors' tumultuous influences, wrote swiftly, travelled extensively and died tragically young. This selection of their verse is accompanied mainly by British paintings of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The aim is not to illustrate the poems, but rather through the paintings to convey the mood of the writing.