Focusing on one group of poets in particular, the Della Cruscans, and on their primary critic William Gifford, I shall argue that it is impossible to outline the position of the sonnet genre within the late eighteenth-century literary landscape and fully to grasp its legacy for nineteenth-century poets if the sonnet genre's strictest formalities alone are taken into consideration.
That the Della Cruscans still need introduction a decade after Jerome McGann's Poetics of Sensibility put their poetry back on the agenda of literary criticism is largely Gifford's doing.
Satire, he argued, was both that against which romanticism ("countersatire") defined itself and also, as a device useful in deflecting ridicule from romanticism's vulnerable self (against the infinitely scapegoatable Della Cruscans, among others), that which aligned the romantics with the antagonists they and their scapegoats had in common.
Their eleven essays discuss satire of British consumer culture, satiric attacks upon the Della Cruscans, satire of interracial and especially black female sexuality, William Wordsworth's treatment at the hands of critics and parodists, correction and self-correction in Jane Austen, children's chapbook verse about bugs, the sympathetic verse satire of Jane Taylor, Intercepted Letters (1813) and The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), the jujitsu tactics of "hacker satire," an American barber's verse advertisements, and pantomime.