This book examines the ways in which the advent of the mass public made the issue of reception central to Romantic poetry and poetics. It argues that the transformation of the relationship between poet and reader in early nineteenth-century England precipitated a fundamental shift in conceptions of the poetic text, literary reception, and authorship. Commentators have long recognized that with the decline of patronage, the rise of the novel and the periodical press, and the emergence of the mass reading public, poets could no longer simply assume the existence of an audience for poetry. But the reconfiguration of the reading public and the literary market did not just alter poets' perceptions of the audience for poetry (as many recent critics have suggested). It also, and more crucially, changed their ways of thinking about poetry and the very forms their poems came to take. In contrast to some of the period's most famous characterizations of poetry – from Wordsworth's definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” to Shelley's image of the poet as “a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds” – texts as different as Keats's early sonnets, Byron's Don Juan, and Shelley's poetry from Queen Mab to Prometheus Unbound demonstrate that in early nineteenth-century England the conditions under which poems were received had come to be an element internal to the production of poetry.