Dr Chris Townsend’s George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language is published by Oxford University Press on May 5th. It’s a study of the idealist philosopher Berkeley and his impact on the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, offering new readings of each poet in light of their debt to Berkeley’s thought. It’s also an effort to think about Romanticism’s role in the history of ideas more broadly, and about what it means for a group of poets to pick up on the ideas of a philosopher.