Most, but not all, of the poetry included in this volume appeared during the nineteenth century. Its authors can be conveniently grouped as Pre-romantics, Romantics, and Victorians. The period when the romantic sensibility was created was the period that ushered in modern times. During it, England was industrialized, political power shifted within the nation, and scientific rationalism became increasingly important. Novels of these period exerted great efforts towards comprehending the complexities of modern society. Poetry, however, reacted away from these historical tendencies, driving inward, to sensitive analyses of the individual soul, or outward to remote and exotic nations or centuries, and they valued natural landscape and rural countryside as never before.
