'Jeffrey C. Robinson's new book rethinks the shifting, often contradictory Romantic concept of 'fancy' in ways that release it from its traditional positioning as the degraded and impoverished sibling of a privileged 'imagination.' By attending with a fresh eye to Romantic critical discourse and to poetic practices based upon continuing investments in the agency of 'fancy,' Robinson is able to offer surprising readings of texts that range from the fragility of lyrical self-discovery to the compelling drama of boxing. As a poet himself, Robinson writes with a fellow practitioner's feel for the often elusive interaction of verbal exploration and historical circumstance. This is a book that everyone who cares about British Romantic culture will be eager to read.' William Keach, Brown University

'Since his stunning book of 1987, Radical Literary Education, no one has done more than Jeffrey Robinson to define the immediate need we always have for poetry. Though its subject matter is some 200 years old, this new book is about poetry and poetics in what Gertrude Stein would call its continuing present. It is, in its own words, an 'experimental poetics both for the history of British Romanticism and for the later history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.' It is a book to wake its neighbours up.' - Jerome McGann, University of Virginia