Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of the Poets argues that the strange portrayal of historical writers in post-Enlightenment English poetry constitutes a genre, a battleground for two central conflicts in the romantic tradition: the confrontation of the self-sufficient imagination with the brute fact of external precursors; and the limits of interpretation. In William Blake's Milton the author of Paradise Lost returns to earth to redeem his female half, confront Satan and herald the apocalypse; Percy Bysshe Shelley's Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been physically deformed and mentally ruined by a hellish chariot in the Triumph of Life; Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his Anactoria, hijacks the ancient Greek poetess Sappho and turns her into his sadistic lesbian anti-Christian vampire-muse. I trace this genre into such contemporary works as James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (in which W.H. Auden and William Butler Yeats, among others, are contacted with a Ouija board), Paul Muldoon's Madoc (which imagines Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey attempting to establish a utopian community in America with disastrous results), John Ashbery's Sleepers Awake (which describes the work of such writers as Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce and Homer in terms of their sleeping habits), and Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours (which includes, in the series TV Men, strange poems about Thucydides, Leo Tolstoy and Anna Akhmatova, among others). I identify this genre's theorists as Walter Pater ("each mind keep[s] as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world"), Oscar Wilde ("the aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it is really not"), Ralph Waldo Emerson ("there is properly no history only biography"), and Harold Bloom (whose poetics of influence describe how one poet misreads another), and argue for the continuity of the imaginary biography with literary criticism.