This Casebook presents a wide-ranging view of elements in eighteenth-century poetry which anticipate the Romantic movement. The principal poets considered are Thomson, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper and Crabbe. The selection of critical commentary is arranged in sections which reflect the different emerging concepts which eventually shaped the Romantic movement, such as Poetics and Poetic Diction, Nature, Landscape and Description, Poetry and Society, Poetry and Religion and The Self and the Imagination.