Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum offers an extensive interdisciplinary study of the relationship between British Romantic poetry and the rise of national museum culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a simultaneously theoretical and historical analysis, it studies a range of poetry and aesthetic philosophy in relation to the first hundred years of the British Museum, from its establishment in the 1750's to the completion of its current edifice in the 1850's. It thereby provides a sequence of aesthetic reflections on the various social, cultural, and imaginative challenges posed by this novel institution. In the process of tracing poetic and critical responses to the museum and its collections, Poetic Exhibitions simultaneously demonstrates the impact of nationalist ideologies and scientific discourse on formal and thematic developments in Romantic poetry and aesthetics.

Both the museum and the nation it serves are realized imaginatively through an imperfect aesthetic accommodation of difference and identity. The museum's official statements of institutional purpose and curatorial design describe a harmonious relationship between an ennobling exhibition and a unified nation. However, accounts of the institution in the popular press, guidebooks to the sights of London, private correspondence, and parliamentary debates depict the museum as a touchstone for social and political conflict. In this fraught domain of national self-promotion, the language of aesthetics provides a nascent curatorial theory of material and cultural reconciliation. An emphasis on the pleasures of imagination grants the poet and spectator especially prominent positions in Romantic culture as both are newly empowered as active participants in the visual and conceptual creation of knowledge. As this role is made available to an ever-widening portion of the national public-including women and members of the working classes-both the nation and the museum dev