1992 0-7734-9638-6 For the first time The Minstrel is here presented as the earliest sustained attempt in English to write the kind of autobiographical poem which sets out to trace the source and the growth of the author's own mind and imagination as affected by literature, life, and especially by nature. Using The Minstrel as a creative model, King illuminates the sources and nature of Romantic autobiography in the works of Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Byron and Chateaubriand.