This book explores the "self-conscious poem" - that is, a poem concerned with poetry that displays awareness of itself as poetry - in the work of the major Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Michael O'Neill's readings freshly illuminate the imaginative distinction of many famous and often-studied poems, and revalue less regarded works. An extended coda looks at some post-Romantic poets, particularly Yeats, Stevens, Auden, and Clampitt, in the light of the book's central theme.