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in the Biographia Literaria: “alas! the multitude of books, and the general
diffusion of literature,”4 and Z., the scourge of Hunt’s Cockney School,
attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine the proliferation of poetry as
a cultural disease, a “Metromanie” leading to an overproduction of books
by “footmen” and every “superannuated governess in the island” (3 [August
1818], p. 519).5 In 1820, as throughout the period, there is alarm over the
sheer volume of material entering into print, and a deeper worry over who
controls that material and, in particular, the cultural capital of verse. To
understand 1820’s literary scene, we must recognize first the quantity of
verse being produced and then the fierce debate under way about the status
of poetry, a debate that begins to narrow the pantheon of a multitude of
books into a canon of authorized authors.
The reading nation and the writerly nation in 1820
During the period between 1770 and 1835, there were more than 4,000 writers producing poetry, of whom about 900 were women, as J. R. de Jackson’s
bibliographies have suggested.6 1820 saw the publication of around 200
new volumes or editions of poetry (57 by women), hardly any of which
would be familiar to scholars today. Since the canon of Romantic verse has
been smaller than that in other periods, there is something illustrative in
simply listing the diversity of verse in 1820, even at the risk of appearing
“metromaniacal”; the list, gesturing towards the encyclopedic, is a feature
of the pantheon.
We have identified Romanticism’s innovations with the lyric, but in 1820,
narrative verse appeared the stronger genre, with Keats, for example, naming his new volume Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems,
George Croly issuing The Angel of the World; an Arabian Tale: Sebastian; a
Spanish Tale: With Other Poems, and “Barry Cornwall” (the pseudonym of
Hunt and Keats’s friend Bryan Waller Procter) offering Marcian Colonna,
An Italian Tale with Three Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems. Even
Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads of 1798 proclaimed the desire to use
the lyric to contest the popularity of narrative and the novelization of verse,

published his Peter Bell (1819), originally written in 1798, not as a lyrical ballad but as a “tale.” There were still works labeled as ballads, such as Robert
Roscoe’s Chevy Chase: A Poem Founded on the Ancient Ballad, but the term
is also attached to pieces taken from plays, such as Pity’s Tear, excerpted from
Thomas Morton’s Henri Quatre; or, Paris in the Olden Times, as well as to
satires such as William Hone and George Cruikshank’s The Green Bag: “A
dainty dish to set before a king;” A Ballad of the Nineteenth Century, with
such titles again suggesting the range of non-lyric verse. About 10 percent of
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