What does it feel like to be (or not to be) attached to a country or community, to have (or not to have) membership or citizenship, in ways that one cannot control? This volume will turn to Romantic poetics to consider how public feelings operate and circulate through the language of poetry. How does poetry mediate the politics and sociality of feeling? How can poetry register not just a solitary, recollected overflow of powerful feeling but also a communal or contagious one? We have gathered a selection of essays that bring together in new configurations the study of poetics, affect, and politics for the field of Romanticism. In response to Lauren Berlant’s suggestion that “public spheres are affect worlds at least as much as they are effects of rationality and rationalization,” how might poetry provide a different kind of understanding of the publics and counterpublics teeming within our public sphere? In a critical tradition that has already—as Mary Favret has shown—increasingly revealed “the intractably social and material bases for romantic esthetics and the poets’ deep awareness of this dependency” (“Study of Affect and Romanticism,” 1163), we mean to pursue more explicitly questions of amorphous political urgency that emerge in an unfolding historical present (whether “then,” “now,” or curiously both). Just like any other domain of culture, Romantic poetry is rife or riven with feeling. But how might we recognize its feelings as tuned in to the political, as public? How might poetic figure or form alter our conception of the feelings that both compose and decompose the individual—the feelings that mark both our alienation from others and our attachments?