Curated playlist
Romantic poets
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
- Walter ScottWalter Scott owed £130,000 and refused any help. The novelist wrote his way out of ruin instead.
- 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.
- Lord ByronWestminster Abbey refused Lord Byron's body for questionable morality. It finally gave him a memorial in 1969.
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheWhen French soldiers broke into Goethe's home in 1806, his companion Christiane Vulpius defended it.
- William WordsworthWordsworth's greatest poem, The Prelude, appeared only months after he died. His widow, Mary, published it in 1850.
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo asked for a pauper's funeral and got the largest in French history.
- Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." He also battled opium addiction for years.
- William BlakeNear death, William Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil. He drew his wife's portrait before he died.
- Romantic poetryWordsworth's 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads called poetry "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."
- Alexander PushkinAlexander Pushkin could not speak Russian well until he was ten years old. He grew up speaking mostly French.
- Mikhail LermontovLermontov wrote a poem about Pushkin's death and was banished to the Caucasus. It made him famous as Pushkin's heir.
- Vasily ZhukovskyScholars cite Vasily Zhukovsky's 1802 translation of an English elegy as Russian Romanticism's starting point.
- Robert SoutheyRobert Southey wrote the original story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He was also Poet Laureate for thirty years.
- Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev called his poems trifles and often lost the scraps of paper they were written on.