Laurel · Every poet, by period

Romantic

1789–1837 · 52 poets · 224,533 lines

Romantic poetry announces itself in Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the preface Wordsworth added to it in 1800, arguing that poetry should use 'the real language of men', and in Blake's Songs, which look like children's rhymes and are not. Wordsworth found the epic subject in his own mind; Coleridge invented a supernatural ballad; Scott made the old metrical romance a bestseller; Byron made ottava rima into a running commentary on everything; Shelley borrowed Dante's terza rima for an ode to the west wind; Keats packed the ode until it could hold no more.

The same decades produced the great long poems of other languages, which is why Goethe, Pushkin and the Kalevala sit here, though Goethe himself had no love for the Romantic label: Faust in shifting German metres, Eugene Onegin in a fourteen-line stanza of its own, and Lönnrot's Finnish epic assembled from the songs of Karelian singers. Faust and the Kalevala can be read here beside their originals, and the rhythms are audible even where the words are not.

  1. William Wordsworth 1770–1850Lyrical BalladsThe Poetical Works, Volume IIThe Poetical Works, Volume III
  2. John Keats 1795–1821Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other PoemsPoems (1817)Endymion: A Poetic Romance
  3. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792–1822The Complete Poetical Works, Volume IThe Complete Poetical Works, Volume II
  4. Lord Byron 1788–1824Don JuanChilde Harold's Pilgrimage
  5. William Blake 1757–1827Poems of William BlakeSongs of Innocence and of Experience
  6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772–1834The Rime of the Ancient MarinerPoems of Coleridge
  7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749–1832Faust, Part One
  8. Alexander Pushkin 1799–1837Eugene Onegin
  9. Robert Southey 1774–1843Thalaba the Destroyer
  10. Thomas Moore 1779–1852Lalla Rookh
  11. Walter Savage Landor 1775–1864Imaginary Conversations and Poems
  12. Walter Scott 1771–1832The Lady of the Lake
  13. Elias Lönnrot 1802–1884The Kalevala
  14. John Clare 1793–1864Poems
  15. Felicia Hemans 1793–1835Poems
  16. Thomas Hood 1799–1845Poems
  17. William Lisle Bowles 1762–1850The Poetical Works, Volume I
  18. Winthrop Mackworth Praed 1802–1839Poems
  19. Robert Bell 1800–1867Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England
  20. Henry Kirke White 1785–1806The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White
  21. L. H. Sigourney 1791–1865The Man of Uz and Other Poems
  22. Helen Maria Williams 1762–1827Poems (1786)
  23. Heinrich Heine 1797–1856Poems and Ballads
  24. Giacomo Leopardi 1798–1837The Poems of Leopardi
  25. Joanna Baillie 1762–1851Poems (1790)
  26. Samuel Rogers 1763–1855Poems
  27. Fitz-Greene Halleck 1790–1867Fanny, with Other Poems
  28. Robert Bloomfield 1766–1823Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs
  29. Joseph Rodman Drake 1795–1820The Culprit Fay and Other Poems
  30. James Hogg 1770–1835Poems
  31. Adam Mickiewicz 1798–1855Sonnets from the Crimea
  32. James Clarence Mangan 1803–1840Poems
  33. Charles Lamb 1775–1834Poems
  34. Thomas Campbell 1774–1844Poems
  35. Thomas Love Peacock 1785–1866Poems
  36. George Darley 1795–1846Poems
  37. Charles Wolfe 1791–1823Poems
  38. Ebenezer Elliott 1781–1849Poems
  39. John Keble 1792–1866Poems
  40. William Thom 1798–1848Poems
  41. Gerald Griffin 1803–1840Poems
  42. Allan Cunningham 1784–1843Poems
  43. Thomas Lovell Beddoes 1803–1849Poems
  44. Robert Stephen Hawker 1804–1875Poems
  45. Carolina, Lady Nairne 1766–1845Poems
  46. Edward Thurlow, Lord Thurlow 1781–1829Poems
  47. Hew Ainslie 1792–1878Poems
  48. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay 1800–1859Poems
  49. Jeremiah Joseph Callanan 1795–1839Poems
  50. Richard Henry Horne 1803–1884Poems
  51. Sir Aubrey de Vere 1788–1846Poems
  52. Mary Lamb 1765–1847Poems

The periods are the ones the history track uses; a poet named in a period's own list belongs to it whatever the dates say.