Samuel Taylor Coleridge¡¯s ¡°Person from Porlock¡± memorably knocked on his door, breaking a fabulous opium-induced vision. Afterwards, Coleridge could salvage only a fragment, Kubla Khan, the magical poem about an imaginary poem, still more magical, but for ever lost to us. Was Coleridge telling the truth? Probably not. But it remains a suggestive myth about the elusiveness of such glimpses of the sublime.

Duncan Wu, in a spirit of common sense, is determined to slay this and 29 other myths about the Romantics. Given Wu¡¯s immense knowledge of the period, we might expect him to challenge the myth of the Big Six Romantic poets. His best-selling anthology Romanticism gives ample space to previously marginalised writers. But you wouldn¡¯t know it from this book: only two chapters, for example, concern female writers.

Many of Wu¡¯s myths are biographical cruxes: was Blake mad? Keats gay? Wordsworth a Tory? De Quincey a drug addict? Leaving aside the question ¡°says who?¡± and the absence of Roland Barthes¡¯ indictment of the practice of reading authors through their biographies, can we let pass Wu¡¯s insistence that there is one incontrovertible biographical truth?

This truth is Wu¡¯s stated quarry. For him, it is to be found by undermining misleading endorsements of the best-known Romantics¡¯ celebrity status. Forget the Byronic hero, for example: the ¡°real Lord Byron¡± was a ¡°flabby, effeminate man who liked wigs, jewellery, and adolescent boys¡±. Perhaps. But it doesn¡¯t explain the enduring appeal of the Byronic myth (an appeal that must explain the jaunty image of Byron on the front cover of this book).

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The brio with which Wu attacks his targets certainly makes for entertaining reading. What a great Regency reviewer he would have made. He is a latter-day Lockhart ¨C the feisty lampooner of the ¡°Cockney School¡± of Keats. This is Lockhart lamenting the ¡°melancholy effect¡± of ex-ploughman Burns¡¯ celebrity, in turning the heads of endless ¡°farm-servants and unmarried ladies¡±: ¡°our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box.¡±

Wu¡¯s main target, however, is the good old ivory tower. Critics are responsible for truths about Romantic writers being ¡°displaced by a dog¡¯s breakfast of conjecture and surmise¡±. Editors fuss over Blake¡¯s punctuation ¡°like underemployed waiters¡±. Myths about Wordsworth¡¯s Lyrical Ballads are perpetuated in a ¡°petrified forest of Readers, Companions, student texts, anthologies, and other instruments of indoctrination¡±. Literary scholars who sully the chaste brother-sister relationship of Wordsworth and Dorothy are ¡°Incest advocates¡± who ¡°should reflect on whether this shambling, self-serving conceit is worth the steroids they pump into it¡±. Blake¡¯s Jerusalem does not champion the ¡°self-befouling cause¡± of ¡°mean, exclusionary, ruddy-faced nationalism¡±.

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So much for his targets. But who is Wu writing for? Will students of Romanticism buy the book because it promises to reveal exactly what happened to Shelley¡¯s heart (a story that ¡°demands to be told¡±)? Current scholars of Romanticism may feel unnerved by his acerbic dismissal of contrary viewpoints, or by finding their work ignored. He¡¯s certainly not out to win new hearts. And surely Romantic myths have more to tell us than is suggested by labelling Coleridge¡¯s Porlock tale a ¡°shaggy dog story so ensnarled in its own essential shagginess it transcends the genre¡±.

Jane Darcy is teaching fellow in English, University College London, and author of Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816 (2013).

30 Great Myths about the Romantics
By Duncan Wu
Wiley Blackwell, 336pp, ?50.00, ?14.99 and ?10.99
ISBN 9781118843260, 43192 and 43185 (e-book)
Published 1 May 2015