Curated playlist
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. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was…
- 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 Cowgate to the gates of the old University. He was the ninth child in a family of…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and…
- 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…
- 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. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- 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 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 Divine Comedy, and he could not stop. On the 12th of August 1827, he finally set down…
- 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 Coleridge were attempting: poetry is, he wrote, "the spontaneous overflow of…
- 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 speaking mostly French, picking up his native tongue from household serfs and a…
- Mikhail LermontovMikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814. Russians sometimes called him the poet of the Caucasus. After Alexander Pushkin died in 1837, many regarded Lermontov…
- 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. Born in 1783 in the village of Mishenskoe in the Tula Governorate, he was the…
- 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. His religious convictions had already been rattled by Gibbon. He was eighteen, ambitious, and…
- 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 of paper they were scribbled on. He called them bagatelles, trifles not worth…