Majestic Indolence examines the theme of indolence - in both its positive and negative forms - as it appears in the work of four canonical Romantic poets. Wordsworth's "wise passiveness," Coleridge's "dejection" and numbing torpor, Shelley's experiments with pastoral dolce far niente, and Keats's figures of "delicious diligent indolence" are treated as individual manifestations of a common theme.

Spiegelman pursues the trope of indolence to its origins in the economic, medical, philosophical, psychological, religious, and literary discourses from the middle ages to the late eighteenth century.

Offering an alternative to recent politically and ideologically motivated literary theory, Spiegelman looks closely at how the poems work. He argues for renewed appreciation of poetic style, literary formalism, and aesthetics as the best gauge to the Romantic treatment of nature and the sublime. The book concludes by examining the transformation of English Romanticism at the hands of two American heirs, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost.