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used “Romanticism” to identify the poetry of the day, and no one would
have selected any of our Romantic canons as a guide through the complex
landscape of contemporary literature.
Forging Romanticism in 1820
The preface to Barrett’s epic The Battle of Marathon returns us to the problem of the explosion of verse, as Barrett writes of how “As the press pours
forth profusion, the literary multitude eagerly receive its lavish offerings.”16
Out of this undifferentiated pantheon, what she calls “an inferior multitude of the common herd,” Barrett identifies three “real Poets” among her
contemporaries: Byron, Moore, and Scott. This little, unremembered act of
canon formation and of love comes amid other efforts to discover what was
truly alive and what would live among the work of the living poets. While
most contemporary anthologies featured earlier verse, and while one might
uncover other canons being formed in discussions of, say, religious poetry or
“working-class” verse,17 we can already see various moves to celebrate the
poets we find central to Romanticism. These efforts to move from pantheon
to canon were deeply contested as canons were formed on the mixed grounds
of aesthetics, morality, religion, ideology, and political efficacy – Barrett, for
example, not only celebrates “poetic excellence” (p. 3) but hopes to prove
“that Poetry is the parent of liberty” (p. 9).
Most anthologies of the day featured not contemporary verse but the
“old canon,” with Thomas Campbell’s massive seven-volume Specimens of
the British Poets (1819) surveying poetry from Chaucer to Cowper and
Beattie, and with others, designed for the schools or the “young” reader,
focusing on the established canon, and particularly on works with a religious bent, as in Mant’s The Parent’s Poetical Anthology: Being a Selection
of English Poems primarily designed to assist in forming the taste and the
sentiments of young readers (1814, 1821). Still, there were various attempts
to survey contemporary poetry, including John Pennie’s The Harp of Parnassus of 1823, which offers Byron, Moore, Scott, Charlotte Smith, Mary
Robinson, Campbell, Southey, and “Cornwall”; and George Croly’s 1828
Beauties of the English Poets, which moves through a historical survey to
include Keats and Hemans. We find something like the pantheon of living

poets displayed in 1820 in Beauties of the Modern Poets; Being Selections
from the Works of the Most Popular Authors of the Present Day; Including
Many Original Pieces, Never Before Published, and An Introductory View of
the Modern Temple of Fame, edited by David Carey. Carey’s volume – like
most such gatherings looking back to Knox’s popular Elegant Extracts –
offers an eclectic gathering of “Moral and Pathetic Pieces,” “Narrative
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