The second volume of "Essays on the History of English Poetry" is devoted mainly to English poets of the romantic and Victorian eras, that is, the 19th century. Famous names sit side by side with relatively little-known ones. So, next to articles about Wordsworth and Keats, there is an extensive article about John Clare, a gifted peasant poet who ended his tragic life in an asylum for the insane. Next to articles on Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins is an essay on the Rhymers' Club, a decadent circle of London poets in the 1890s that included W.B. Yeats, Arthur Simons, Ernst Dawson, Lionel Johnson, etc. A separate part of the book talks about the classics of nonsense - Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Herbert Chesterton. Other essays talk about the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites, about E. Housman and R. Kipling, as well as about 20th-century poets: Robert Graves, singer of the White Goddess, and Winstan Hugh Auden. The cross-cutting theme of the book can be considered the romantic line of English poetry - from William Blake to the “last romantic” Yeats and beyond. As in the first volume, the essays are illustrated with translations of poetry by the author.