“Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” wrote John Keats in 1816. While his sonnet celebrates the originality of his contemporaries and the historical significance of his times, it also points to a deep interest in “the hum of mighty works” in all the fields of human activity—to which “the nations” ought to listen. In his letter of October 8, 1817 to a friend Benjamin Bailey, Keats represented the backstage of the complex interactions between the many “great spirits” that “sojourned” in his day: Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Leigh Hunt, Benjamin Haydon, and others. All these “great spirits” in many different ways stimulated each other into artistic creativity. To describe this rich and potent network, Keats borrows a line from Shakespeare, and calls it “the web … of mingled Yarn.” In All's Well That Ends Well, from which the phrase is taken, it is used to describe the difficulties of maintaining the moral equilibrium when faced with hard choices. Keats places the metaphor in a different context and extends its meaning to represent the intricacy of connections among poets and artists, their friendships and animosities, their mutual fascinations and rivalries, their families and their everyday cares. At the same time, by the very act of using Shakespeare's words, Keats both acknowledges his own connection and debt to the dead poet and enters into a dialogue with him. Thus, the redefined “web of mingled yarn” also encompasses in its meaning the relations of creative influence across time.

For this volume, the metaphor proves a particularly useful illustration of artistic interconnectedness composed of many crisscrossing strands of cultural exchanges, with Romanticism at its center. This collection started with the idea of building on Susan Wolfson's study Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action, where she defines interaction as the way in which writers construe themselves as “authors” in relation to other authors. The essays in this collection often used Wolfson's phrase for their springboard as their first versions were presented at the conference “Romantic Interactions” held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in April 2019. Methodologically and thematically, however, their scope often goes beyond Wolfson's understanding of the term.