Through an incisive analysis of the emerging debates surrounding urbanization in the Romantic period, together with close readings of poets including William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen Tedeschi explores the notion that the Romantic poets criticized the historical form that the process of urbanization had taken, rather than urbanization itself. The works of the Romantic poets are popularly considered in a rural context and often understood as hostile to urbanization - one of the most profound social transformations of the era. By focusing on the urban aspects of such writing, Tedeschi re-orientates the relationship between urbanization and English Romantic poetry to deliver a study that discovers how the Romantic poets examined not only the influence of urbanization on poetry but also how poetry might help to reshape the form that urbanization could take.

‘Stephen Tedeschi’s Urbanization and English Romantic Poetry is an invigorating and at times demanding challenge to one of the central structuring oppositions in the study of British literature: that of the country versus the city … It asks its readers to recognize the world-changing potential of poetry and moreover that the idea that poetry could change the world was itself a product of the particular social conjunctions …’

Ian Newman Source: The Wordsworth Circle