Curated playlist
19th-century English poets
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats. He was twelve years old, and his father had just been locked inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in…
- John KeatsJohn Keats had been publishing poetry for less than four years when tuberculosis killed him in Rome at the age of 25. His last request was a tombstone bearing no name and no date, only the words, "Here lies One whose Name was writ in…
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPercy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a storm off the Italian coast on the 8th of July 1822, age 29, before most of the world had ever read a word he wrote. His boat, the Don Juan, had been custom-built in Genoa, and his second wife Mary…
- Mary ShelleyMary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on the 30th of August 1797 in Somers Town, London, and she died on the 1st of February 1851 at Chester Square. In the fifty-three years between those dates, she wrote the novel that gave the world its…
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry…
- Lord ByronLord Byron got up at two in the afternoon. By the time he sat down to dinner, the house around him resounded with the unarbitrated quarrels of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon, with…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world would come to know him by a name he invented for himself: Lewis Carroll. That name…
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy died at Max Gate on the 11th of January 1928, but not before dictating one final poem to his wife from his deathbed. His death certificate listed cardiac syncope as the cause, with old age as a contributing factor. He was 87.…
- William WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April 1770 in what is now called Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, a market town sitting at the edge of the Lake District. He died on the 23rd of April 1850 at Rydal Mount, the same…
- Alfred, Lord TennysonAlfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August 1809 in Somersby, a small village in Lincolnshire, and by the time he died on the 6th of October 1892, lines from his poems had entered everyday English speech so thoroughly that most people…
- Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" - and for much of his life, he seemed to be asking the world to practice it on his behalf. Born on the 21st of October 1772 in the small Devon town of Ottery St Mary, he…
- William MorrisWilliam Morris arrived in the world on the 24th of March 1834, and by the time he died on the 3rd of October 1896, he had left his mark on textiles, poetry, fantasy fiction, architectural preservation, and revolutionary socialism. Few…
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin Disraeli climbed what he called "the top of the greasy pole" to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, not once but twice, despite arriving at Westminster as an outsider with debts he could not fully settle until 1849, a…
- Robert BridgesRobert Seymour Bridges, born on the 23rd of October 1844, spent the first four decades of his adult life doing something that might seem strange for a man history remembers as Britain's Poet Laureate: he practiced medicine. He worked as a…