Imagined Sovereignties: Poetics, Politics and Romanticism argues for a new understanding of the relationship between Romantic conceptions of the imagination and the emergence of modern forms of political sovereignty. Its central idea is that the Romantics reconceived not just the nature of aesthetic imagination, but the conditions in which a specific form of political sovereignty could be realized through it. Through close readings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, the author elucidates how Romanticism's re-assertion of poetic power in place of the divine sovereign articulates an alternative understanding of the secularization of the political. Taking Carl Schmitt's arguments about the political significance of Romanticism as its point of departure, the book shows how the link between the poetic imagination and the problem of modern political sovereignty involves more than simply replacing God as the source of political authority with the subjective imagination, thereby instituting the triumph of the bourgeois liberal subject. Instead, by investigating how the imagination develops an alternative political theology in Blake, a new understanding of the unconditional in Coleridge, a reconceptualization of the body politic in Wordsworth, and a re-consideration of the material conditions in which popular sovereignty emerges in Shelley, the author demonstrates how Romanticism produces alternative forms of sovereignty that are no longer modeled on any form of transcendence, divine or human. These readings force us to re-examine not only our conception of the political significance of Romanticism, but also its place within the development of modern political sovereignty. It thereby reveals that certain aspects of Romanticism still provide an important resource for rethinking the limits of the political in our own time. The book will be a crucial source for those interested in the political legacy of Romanticism, as well as anyone concerned with critical theoretical approaches to politics in the present.