Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (The Intimations Ode as it is almost always called) is the single central work of British romantic poetry and widely regarded as one of the greatest English poems of any age…. 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Thomas Gray may have begun writing Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as early as 1746. He discarded four stanzas of an early version, which were probably read by his friend Horace Walpole, and planned to title the work simply… Read More ›
When Oliver Goldsmith wrote his 431-line poem in rhyming couplets The Deserted Village (1770), he exhibited the talent for shrewd observation and scene for which he had gained a reputation. He also imbued this idealization of English rural life with… Read More ›