“There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott.”
Some famous Romantic poets include: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Clare, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. And many more!
Other notable American poets of the 19th Century include: Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, and the Transcendentalists David Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Famous poets include the group known as the Fireside Poets, who wrote poems intended for common folk. They were from New England and generally held liberal and abolitionist views, particularly Whittier. They include: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Cullen Bryant and Lucy Larcom.
Phillis Wheatley who, despite being sold into slavery at age seven, displayed such brilliance that she was educated by the liberal Boston family who owned her, and became a published and well-regarded poet. She met, and impressed George Washington. Other 19th Century African American poets include: Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Pricilla Jane Thompson, Mary E Tucker, Maggie Pogue Johnson, James Madison Bell, Alfred Islay Walden, Elymas Payson Rogers and Lawrence Paul Dunbar. Also check out George Marion McClellen, who wrote A January Dandelion.
Both Tennyson and Scott wrote epic poems that look back to the literature of medieval romance, from which the Romantic era gets its name: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and The Lady of Shallot is an epic poem about the knights of Camelot. Scott’s The Lady of the Lake is about Scotland’s own past historical kings. Each of these two works neatly weaves the connection from classical epic poetry to medieval romance to Romantic poetry. Edmund Spenser had done this earlier in The Fairie Queen, as an example of medieval romance revival in the Renaissance. Also consider the work of Christina Rossetti, who breaks poetic ode form to create mystical narratives such as Goblin Market. Her poem, When I am dead, my dearest, is also famous for its connection to nature, and is often quoted for its insight in coping with death, another element of the Romantic spirit. Also check out her brother, Dante Rossetti, who formed the fantastic Pre-Raphaelites group of artists in the mid-19th century.
Spain, France and Germany all have celebrated Romantic poets as well: August Wilhelm Schlegel and his brother, Friederich Schlegel in Germany; Baudelaire and Rimbaud in France; and in Spain, Manuel Jose Quintana, Jose Zorilla, Gustavo Adolfo Bequer, Rosalia de Castro, and Jose de Espronceda.
Follow the Links to Odes and Other Poems:
Walt Whitman,When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
William Wordsworth, Ode:Intimation of Immortality
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
John Keats, Ode to Autumn
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats, Ode on Melancholy
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and When I am dead, my dearest
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot, The Lotos-eaters and Ulysses
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and When I am dead, my dearest
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot, The Lotos-eaters and Ulysses
List of 19th Century African American Poets
Elements of
Romantic Poetry:
·
Personal
Experience
·
Subjective
Emotion
·
Nobility
of Peasants, Common Folks and Earthy Language
·
Against
Social Injustice/the Individual Over the Majority (Social Realism)
·
Heightened
or Altered States (Sometimes, well, often induced!)
·
Attention
to the Morbid and Gothic
·
Attention
to the Medieval, Mystical and Heroic
·
Nature
As an Extension of Feelings As Part of the Individual
·
Nature
As God
·
Heightened
Consciousness and Passion over Rationality
·
New
Attention to Religious Revivalism and Eastern (Buddhism, Hindu) Religion
·
The
Transcendental Movement in America is part of Romanticism
·
Death
in the prime of life as a result of diseases, particularly tuberculosisGothic Writers: Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Emily* and Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins. Social Realism: Dickens, Tolstoy, Emil Zola, Victor Hugo*, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Nathanael Hawthorne, Henry James
