Review of Michael O'Neill and Charles Mahoney, eds., Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Friends of Coleridge in the Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 43, Summer 2014.WHICH ANTHOLOGY? THE FORCE OF THIS QUESTION will be readily apparent to the students that we teach, and that we ourselves once were. But in recent years the dilemma of how readers choose primers has also extended beyond this practical element, to become one of the research academy’s most sustaining critical preoccupations. Even in those institutions that generally choose not to employ anthologies as part of their syllabi (the one for which I presently work being one such entity), the forms of selection, dissemination and exclusion that such collections make manifest are at once representative of broader questions, and worthy of study in their own right. That we might now think twice before setting Robert Southey’s Annual Anthology or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as representative guides only makes such texts more useful in another guise, as an indication of the implicit valuations and prohibitions of a particular era