This book is a study of war and the perceptions of war. It deals specifically with the British Romantic period writers who lived through the Napoleonic wars, and the way in which those wars affected the writing of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and many of their contemporaries. Watson discusses the particular fascination of those wars, and the way in which they affected a way of thinking about war that lasted until the early twentieth century.

J.R. Watson is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham. He is author of Wordsworth's Vital Soul, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830, The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and The English Hymn, and the editor of anthologies, most recently An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (2002).