A prologue is followed by an examination of Blake's "London" and Wilhelm Müller's "Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" The article attempts an explanation for the prominence of the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" in the Romantic period. It also investigates why poems are interpreted differently according to the context in which they are viewed.

Lowell's poem might be cited as a poignant example of an expression of cultural pessimism couched in poetic form, anticipating the ecological movement of today. This critique is not so much concerned with what the poet says as how he says - or rather - suggests a modern world inhabited by the dinosaurs of the distant past

"..all wandering as the worst of sinning"

What can an odd and humorous combination of words in Byron's Don Juan possibly reveal about matters concerning the form and content of Milton's great epic Paradise Lost?

Why the excessive use of the word "Wanderer" in 18th-Century Poetry? How was this symptomatic of a general crisis in the development of European literature? An examination of the seminal influence of Goethe's "Speech on Shakespeare's Day" /("Rede zu Shakespears Tag",1771).

Two poems by Robert Browning "By the Fire-Side" and "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" are looked at closely with regard to the implications of words and expressions such as "Good News".