A series of lectures delivered at Harvard University during 1948-1949, published as they were delivered. They comprise a classic, illuminating study of the major poets of the Romantic movement and their followers: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Poe, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Swinburne. By creating an imaginary world, the Romantic does not merely offer an escape but 'believes that in exercising his imagination he creates life and adds to the sum of experience'.