Aurora Leigh is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most ambitious work. Both its very high poetic quality, when the poem is at its best, and its sometimes turgid moralizing, when it is at its worst, were noted by contemporary reviewers like George… Read More ›
Percy Bysshe Shelley invited John Keats to come to live in Pisa’s more salubrious climate after Keats had been struck with consumption (tuberculosis). Keats only got as far as Rome, where he died on February 23, 1821. Although Shelley did… Read More ›
Songs of Innocence and of Experience contain William Blake’s best-known and most widely read works, including what is perhaps his most famous poem, The Tyger. The book, beautifully and delicately illustrated by Blake, has been vastly influential, determining, for example,… Read More ›
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this wildly popular sonnet sequence, most famous for its penultimate sonnet— “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” (sonnet 43)—during Robert Browning’s courtship of her in 1845 and 1846. She only showed him… Read More ›
This is one of the most famous songs from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long narrative poem The Princess. In the poem’s context, the song is sung in public at the Princess’s command to pass a brief interval in the arduous studies… Read More ›
The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas… Read More ›
This is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for his most characteristic and idiosyncratic poetic mode. Hopkins seemed to define it as organizing lines around stressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, the poetic foot always starts on a stressed syllable and may be… Read More ›
Gerard Manley Hopkins regarded The Windhover as his best poem. It combines all his characteristic and idiosyncratic intensities with extraordinary verve and power. Hopkins focuses simultaneously on poetic form and on what that form itself represents—what its physical power may be… Read More ›
“Victorian poetry” is a term that does not quite coincide with the reign of Queen Victoria—a reign that began with the death of her uncle, William IV, in 1837 and lasted until her own death some 63 years later on… Read More ›
The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that… Read More ›
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most popular poem. It opened the 1798 first edition of Lyrical Ballads, where it first appeared; Coleridge revised it for the 1800 edition and undertook further revisions later, after his… Read More ›
Frost at Midnight is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most beautiful poems, It belongs to the genre he called “conversation poems” (in the subtitle to “The Nightingale”)—that is, poems in the style of a person talking to a listener, perhaps… Read More ›
This is one of John Keats’s best-loved poems, with a wonderfully happy ending. Keats wrote it in late January 1819 (St. Agnes Day is January 21, and Keats seems to have started composition a few days before that). It is… Read More ›
Dover Beach is Matthew Arnold’s most famous poem, as well as one of the standard poems in all Victorian canons. It was written sometime between 1848 and 1851 but not published till 1867, when Arnold had essentially ceased writing poetry…. Read More ›
Don Juan is nowadays regarded as Byron’s crowning achievement and his greatest long poem. Unlike the Satanic self-dramatizing that was the source of his fame in the 19th century, in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage especially, Don Juan shows Byron… Read More ›
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802) Dejection is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poems, and one of the greatest crisis lyrics of English romanticism. It is in a sense Coleridge’s answer to William Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, as well as to Wordsworth’s… Read More ›
The Darkling Thrush is one of Thomas Hardy’s characteristic poems of bleak despair over the world, natural and emotional. It is the last poem of the 19th century, or at least the last one to be discussed in this book,… Read More ›
According to the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth agreed to divide their contributions to the joint volume, with Coleridge writing the “supernatural poems” and Wordsworth the natural ones—the scenes of everyday life. Coleridge’s contributions… Read More ›
The two chimney-sweeper poems in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience belong to the explicitly paired poems in the two books. In most of these pairings, the later song mounts a fiercer and more overt critique of the… Read More ›
The Blessed Damozel is one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s earliest poems, as well as one of his greatest and best known. A quarter of a century after writing it at 18, Rossetti depicted its subject in one of his most… Read More ›