SOURCE: "Climbing Parnassus, and Falling Off," in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, edited by Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 40-58.

In the following essay, Murphy examines why Rogers's work is considered "boring" by many critics by comparing Rogers 's The Pleasures of Memory with Wordworth's "An Evening Walk "

Students of British romantic culture have always known that their canon of major writers is and has been for a long time an unusually revisionary one. We know that the list of the "big six" excludes all the popular and important women writers (like Felicia Hemans and Charlotte Smith), but the proper way to put it is that it quite simply excludes all of the most popular poets of the period, with the exception of Byron. We know many of their names (in addition to Hemans and...