Bright Stars

The most celebrated poet of his day after Byron, Barry Cornwall, pseudonymous identity of Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), was a solicitor, dandy, and pugilist championed by Leigh Hunt, as well as the author of three books of heralded verse. This volume attempts to square Cornwall’s early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect, emphatically returning an important and unjustly neglected Romantic author to critical focus, and exploring the fascinating mirror between this own trajectory into celebrity with that of his now better-known contemporary, John Keats.