“Poetry’s Appeal situates itself in what might be considered the single most significant critical debate in Romanticism over the last two or so decades. Its principal concern being the relation between (poetic) language and history, it reconsiders what has been characterized as the retreat of literature, and in particular the lyric, from politics. . . . Burt’s readings follow in the line of important critics such as Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Kevin Newmark, who have brought the most finely tuned rhetorical readings to nineteenth-century French literature.”—European Romantic Review