Curated playlist
19th-century English poets
- Charles DickensAt twelve, Charles Dickens pasted labels on boot blacking pots in a rat-infested warehouse.
- John KeatsJohn Keats asked for a tombstone with no name on it. He died in Rome at 25, sure he had failed as a poet.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPoet Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was identified partly by a copy of Keats's Lamia in his jacket.
- Mary ShelleyMary Shelley conceived Frankenstein in a waking dream after Lord Byron proposed a ghost story contest.
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling turned down both a knighthood and the Poet Laureateship. He won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- Lord ByronWestminster Abbey refused Lord Byron's body for questionable morality. It finally gave him a memorial in 1969.
- Lewis CarrollOn a rowing trip in July 1862, Lewis Carroll invented a story for three sisters.
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy's heart and ashes were buried in two different places. The Abbey got his ashes, Stinsford his heart.
- William WordsworthWordsworth's greatest poem, The Prelude, appeared only months after he died. His widow, Mary, published it in 1850.
- Alfred, Lord TennysonGrief for a friend who died at twenty-two shaped Tennyson's masterpiece.
- Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." He also battled opium addiction for years.
- William MorrisWilliam Morris despised industrial capitalism yet decorated the homes of the rich.
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin Disraeli bought a controlling stake in the Suez Canal within days in 1875.
- Robert BridgesRobert Bridges was the only medical graduate to hold the office of Poet Laureate. He was appointed in 1913.
- John Henry NewmanJohn Henry Newman was an English theologian who became a cardinal and, in 2019, a saint. On the 2nd of October 2008, his grave was opened so that his remains could be moved to a tomb inside the Birmingham Oratory. There, visitors could…