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their contemporaries and that continue to intrigue us. Of course, the presence of distinctly experimental verse points to the fact that much poetry in
the period followed more conventional models or perhaps turned to roads
not taken in the development of British literature. What we must remember
is that the poetic field at the time was much larger than any canon we have
yet assembled, and that Romanticism, while grounded in the work of the
period and descriptive of its most challenging verse, is our creation, so that
period labels such as “Laker” or “Cockney” serve to define fault lines within
Romanticism even as we seek to separate the “Romantic” from other kinds
of writing of the day.
Stuart Curran has called 1820 “the highwater mark for verse in the
Romantic period,”2 and indeed, with the publication of distinctive volumes
by Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Hemans, it is perhaps as key to our sense
of Romanticism in its closing years as is 1798, with its publication of Lyrical Ballads, to our conception of the initial phase of Romantic poetry. The
year 1820 also provides a point of entry into the story of the construction
of Romanticism, as we can see how a quite broad field of varying kinds of
poetry came to be defined by the work of a few favored writers, not necessarily recognized as central at the time or as members of a coherent movement,
with this narrowing being corrected only in part when recently, the canon
of the “Big Six” has been expanded to include other writers active in 1820,
particularly women. As we turn to 1820’s “pantheon of living poets,” we
should be alive to those poets who mattered to those living in 1820, to those
poets who continue to live for readers and writers today, and simply to those
poets who lived and wrote at the time. The term “pantheon,” taken from a
temple to all the gods in Rome, was most often used in the period to refer
to encyclopedic accounts of the Greek and Roman (or Hindu, Chinese, or
Egyptian) gods or to buildings modeled on the Pantheon, such as a place of
entertainment with that name in London, or the Panth´eon in Paris, which,
with its memorials to the recently dead heroes of the Revolution, provides
a model of a gathering of illustrious contemporaries. This attempt to reconstruct a poetic pantheon frames writing in a way different than efforts to
define either a limited or an expanded canon, for a “heathen” pantheon,

unlike a “sacred” canon, seeks to include all the “gods” of poetry, no matter
how minor, how disparate, how heterodox.
England (and its poetry) in 1820
The year 1820 is not a “hot” date. It is not 1789, which opened the revolutionary era, or 1815, with Napoleon’s return for the Hundred Days and
Waterloo, or 1819, when widespread discontent and demands for Reform
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