Timothy Morton explores the significance of spice, and the spice trade, in Romantic literature, shedding new light on the impact of a growing consumer culture and capitalist ideology on writers of the period. The Poetics of Spice includes discussion of a wide range of related topics--exoticism, orientalism, colonialism, the slave trade, race and gender issues, and, above all, capitalism. The book surveys literary, political, medical, travel, trade and philosophical texts, and includes new readings of Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith and Southey among many others.