Curated category
Romantic poets
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own.
- Walter ScottWalter Scott was born on the 15th of August 1771 in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd, a narrow alleyway in Edinburgh's Old Town, leading from the…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the…
- 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…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia.
- 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.
- William BlakeWilliam Blake spent one of his last shillings on a pencil so he could keep sketching. He was near death, working feverishly on illustrations for Dante's…
- Romantic poetryRomantic poetry arrived with a declaration. In the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth defined the new kind of writing he and Samuel Taylor…
- Alexander PushkinAlexander Sergeyevich Pushkin could not speak Russian well until he was ten years old. The boy who would become the father of Russian literature grew up…
- Mikhail LermontovMikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814.
- Vasily ZhukovskyVasily Zhukovsky composed the words that Russians sang as their national anthem for decades, yet he spent much of his career translating other people's poems.
- Robert SoutheyRobert Southey arrived at Balliol College, Oxford, carrying, by his own account, a head full of Rousseau and Werther and a heart full of poetry.
- Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev wrote roughly 400 short poems across his entire life, yet he rarely bothered to write them down. When he did, he frequently lost the scraps…