Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron

STC ftw.

outstanding poll. "not Shelley" is my only sure thing here -- I mean:

1) Blake is a whole world, ahead of everything, both a fount of inspiration but self-contained
2) Wordsworth, late drop-off or not, is such a beautiful writer, The Prologue is...I mean I haven't in years but in my wrestling-with-the-canon days he was one I wanted to buck against but couldn't, you read him and you feel the life of poetry, strong poss
3) Coelridge is probably a better pure poet than W. tbh but I've spent less time with him -- feels like one of those writers where the ~person~ matters as much as the work, I'm kind of allergic to that
4) Keats is just a beautiful soul in his work
5) no
6) well now hold up just a God damned minute.

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon..

I mean...

But for the present, gentle reader! and
Still gentler purchaser! the bard—that's I—
Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,
And so your humble servant, and good bye!
We meet again, if we should understand
Each other; and if not, I shall not try
Your patience further than by this short sample—
'Twere well if others follow'd my example.

Wedded she was some years, and to a man
Of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;
And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE
'Twere better to have TWO of five-and-twenty,
Especially in countries near the sun:
And now I think on't, 'mi vien in mente,'
Ladies even of the most uneasy virtue
Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty.

Byron alone in this crew is kinda witty, more modern than you'd think though Wordsworth is really the gateway to modern thought in poetry imo -- I feel like of all these guys Byron is the one who's fondest of Pope. I too am fond of Pope. Still, Blake, still, Wordsworth, I don't know man

Instinctively, Keats as a poet, Coleridge as, like, a 'figure' and Blake as the godhead (even if he'd probably be fourth on the list as 'poetry I'd reach for'). I like JEdgar's classification of Wordsworth as the most modern but I don't know, I think I've missed my time. Byron has almost entirely passed me by. (Shelley: I'm still making my mind up. I have Richard Holmes' *The Pursuit* on order).

This is a fun poll. Even if I already voted I feel like studying up and may actually follow through and do so. Here is a trivia question for you: which of these guys wrote a poem about a statue of Isaac Newton that provided the title for a Nico album?

I used to work pretty close to this place called Poets House down by the Battery. I loved going in there in the afternoon or the evening, just soaking it up and reading a little bit of this or that.

Seems like it’s been closed but is about to reopen, yay!

https://poetshouse.org/

Feel like I'd need to read more Byron before deciding as I don't really know him. The main question is whether Coleridge has written enough to justify a vote, because his smallish extant oeuvre is powerful beyond belief. Otherwise the choice is between Metal and Prog (Blake and Keats)

Lol

read some Byron, Shelley and Keats
recited it over a hip-hop beat

Fucking Keats in a walk, man.

Wordsworth is Indie in this metaphor obv. I won't rule him out either actually, considering that

The Miracle Of The Prelude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr_OlRw2Wro

Thought you might be here to protest the exclusion of Robert Burns.

In a poll of English Romantic poets? Away wi' ye.

Burns' fanbase would be indignant at calling him an English Romantic, even if he was their contemporary and he certainly read them.

Blake has always been an anomaly. He was only a late tack-on to the 'English Romantics' canon because no one knew what else to make of him. His 'Songs' are greatness distilled, but his other works are rather rough sledding.

Seems like some think of him as a proto-Romantic poet.

He is included in the Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse but now I see that it is as a precursor, along with Thomson, Gray, Collins, Smart, Cowper and Chatterton.

I have great affection for Coleridge after finishing Richard Hughes' magnificent two-volume bio. Wordsworth comes off as an amoral shit, though the greatest literary epiphany of my life occurred reading an excerpt from The Prelude in my AP exam; reading it made me realize I'm going to be a writer.

Byron is so. much. fun. Don Juan? Who cares about finishing it? You can pick it up in the middle, the end, the beginning -- it's a poet setting the wittiest chat ever to metrics.

My friends roll their eyes when I recite "Ode to a Nightingale."

Shelley's the lib, hence the one to whom I feel the greatest affinity.

Here's what Shelley could do at his most miniaturist:

When passion's trance is overpast,
If tenderness and truth could last,
Or live, whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep,
I should not weep, I should not weep!

It were enough to feel, to see,
Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly,
And dream the rest—and burn and be
The secret food of fires unseen,
Couldst thou but be as thou hast been,

After the slumber of the year
The woodland violets reappear;
All things revive in field or grove,
And sky and sea, but two, which move
And form all others, life and love.

Burns' fanbase would be indignant at calling him an English Romantic, even if he was their contemporary and he certainly read them

He was Blake's contemporary but I don't know if he ever read him. Wordsworth and Coleridge Taylor had barely been published by the time of Burns' death and the others were either in short trousers or still in their prams so he certainly hadn't read them!

Blake was two years older than Burns! But lived a few years longer.

Reading Hughes' bio made me realize Coleridge's Tory reputation was overstated; Byron adored him and published him. It was Wordsworth whose circle of fawning acolytes (aka Dorothy) got tighter and tighter.

Ugh, fuck Wordsworth.

And I WILL get Captain Save-A-Shelley in this thread if I have to.

Also:

William Blake stans: this man is visionary... a true psychedelic mystic and seer of old Albion

William Blake:
tiger tiger you are neat
seeing you's a real big treat

— 📻 Pépito fan (@nailheadparty) May 14, 2019

Hi

Wordsworth, I kill you filthy.

To be fair to Blake, I don't really know his poetry aside from the Tyger, so it might be amazing. I do totally rate his artwork as well, I just happen to find that tweet incredibly funny.

none of these dudes could swim like Byron though. has to count for something

I loved - but those I loved are gone;
Had friends - my early friends are fled:
How cheerless feels the heart alone
When all its former hopes are dead!
Though gay companions o'er the bowl
Dispel awhile the sense of ill;
Though pleasure stirs the maddening soul,
The heart - the heart - is lonely still.

For selfish reasons I think people should vote based on how many times their guy appears on this thread: This Be The Pocket Universe: Post Here When You Realize Or Are Reminded That An SF Title Is From The Canon Of English Poetry

I'd have sex with Byron imo

who wouldn't!

Wordsworth wasn’t just a Tory, he was something like the original disillusioned radical. This is why he feels more contemporary to me than all the others. This doesn’t mean I rate him the highest, but in some ways he is the easiest to know, at least for me, and that counts for something.

Keats is the one students love, especially when they learn about his brief and tragic life. To me he is actually the most profound because he seems to understand that one must be open to death in order to live. He doesn’t *really* envy the grecian urn or the bright star; he thinks he does at first but then he talks himself out of it. The essence of his poetry is paradox.

Shelley is the one I wish I could be. Earnest, utopian, reckless, beautiful, and unafraid. I understand why people dislike him; he seems to be the only one of these guys who was truly allergic to irony, and unfortunately a lot of the other Romantic poets were misunderstood, I think, because people confused them for Shelley. But he was a spirit of his age because he was really seeking freedom and wasn’t yet cynical at all about it, like he believed it didn’t contradict equality at all, that everything would be perfect if people let go of their need to dominate others:

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.

This is amazing, but it’s wrong. You cannot love everyone equally. To love your partner or your child is to love them more than other people. It also means making sacrifices on your behalf, like even if monogamy isn’t your thing, you need to make some kind of arrangements with your partner that respects *their* feelings as an individual. You can’t just like make love to the universe eternally.

Shelley was horrible around women tbc

Because he thought being a callous womanizer made him a feminist due to his sophistry about free love. He was insane.

Wordworth admitted the liberal-as-a-young-man trope among writers; his behavior toward Coleridge -- who never stopped believing in him, including a poem called "Ode to William Wordsworth" -- was contemptible by every standard of behavior.

*Wordsworth originated

Phew - saw this thread at the top and thought one of them must have died!

Shelley = total arsehole to women.
Byron = loveable lothario, daww.

(tbc: both arseholes to women)

We did this over a decade ago (no criticism - it's interesting to come back to this question over time) and broadly, I agree with me:

Romantic Poets Poll

In detail, I've shifted a bit.

I'm more inclined just to say 'It's Blake, it has to be Blake'. More and more as I get older I like that he breaks everything, he doesn't fit - the poems are images, the books are alive. I went repeatedly to the exhibition at Tate Britain a few years back (joined the Tate so I that could just drop in whenever) and it was overwhelming - no amount of reading tells me where this come from, how this completely integrated living force generated lyric, psyche-epic, myth-narrative, radical apocalypse sometimes all at once. idk he's amazing. And messy! None of this of this perfect, but that's why it's alive. He and his works are mysteries and mysteries deserve contemplation.

OK the later prophetic books can be hard work, but I'd rather reread them than… I'll come back to this.

I also accept this might all be evidence for my mid-life crisis manifesting as a back-transformation into teen stonerdom (without the weed weirdly)

BUT it still bothers me that he doesn't fit in this list.

So of the others…

Byron: That unfinished Blake thought four paragraphs up was "I'd rather reread the Four Zoas than Don Juan". This honestly surprised me when I said it to myself - I've grown up liking Juan a lot, and it's most of Byron's reputation as a poet now. But it's slacker than I remember when I pick it up, there's less fun and successful flash there than I want. It's a fine line between 'capacious form that lets/makes the right sort of mind be unusually brilliant/entertaining/incisive' and 'shape that just gets filled up on autopilot' and there are just too many stretches of Juan that feel like the latter.

Maybe it's just a phase. I admit I soured on him after reading Fiona MacCarthy's biography - I was coming away thinking I just don't like the fucker, he doesn't treat people right. And of course I can see a kind of case for the letters/journals + Juan (in particular) + the legend/life serving as a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, but it's not one I want right now. I'll get my "that-there sort of writing" elsewhere.

Aero otm on Wordsworth. No-one quite has the power to mug me quite like him. I was on a long bus ride recently & decided to check out with an audiobook - found The Prelude and 'thought ok it's been a few years let's just pick up wherever I was - it can chug along in its cloudy beautiful way and I can drift off' and this was effective for a bit, but it was book 6 and crossing the Alps just electrified me (a particular sense 'electrify' needed for one of the great deliberate anti-climaxes, but something thrilling about the simultaneous inadequacy and adequacy of the world against the imagination).

Shelley, barely any new thoughts. I go through moments of thinking 'hmmm Eton radicals - that's a type' and have half a thought about Byron/Shelley as an aristocratic takeover of a bourgeois/clerical movement but I'm not solid on any of this and anyway, 'lions after slumber' yes.

So I'll vote Keats. Those odes!

in the Hughes bio, Coleridge admits to a friend he was smitten with Byron (who had more than a couple dalliances with boys).

Byron's letters are a delight.

yes after reading the MacCarthy biog, his bisexuality feels crucial. It seems pretty clear that it forces him to leave England in the first place & it's sort of fascinating how far it puts us from the old small-r romantic myth of the womaniser.

I think I'm voting Coleridge, for idiosyncratic reasons of personal sentimental value.

But for the sake of discussion, I will propose a question: Did any of these mint an expression worth more today in the coin of everyday English than "an albatross around one's neck"?

That is an interesting question. There's nothing I can think of in everyday English. Most of their pervasive lines are either signifiers of poetry, meta-poetic (ie someone saying 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' signals that they are being poetic, not that they wandering lonely as a c; 'water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink' functions similarly - I knew it as the sort of thing that would be the feed line for an deflating punchline before I'd ever heard of Coleridge) or float around as half-alive phrases in not-quite-everyday English (a thing of beauty is a joy forever, child is father of the man, etc).

I do wonder if that first class has died off. I imagine everyone read these poems in school through the 50s and 60s, so they were part of the common stock of reference. That wasn't really true for me as a child of the 80s, but they were still around, even in children's comics. Seems unlikely that they've survived, but maybe zombie cultural signifiers can keep going for a long time.

I've heard "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" a few times.

I discovered Keats through Scott Fitzgerald, and in high school I memorized "Ode to a Nightingale," bits of "Ode to a Grecian Urn," and will often murmur "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" before bed.

Are asking if the Romantics have survived in popular culture or in schools? If the former, well, I'm not sure. Who reads poetry?

Maybe I'm wondering if the image of the Romantic poet remains the image of a poet for people who don't read poetry? I think maybe yes (evidence: the sitcom Ghosts)

I'd guess they've pretty much gone from schools.

I like their survival in unexpected places - the Coogan/Brydon Trips

I'm not asking about some one sphere or other, Alfred, but about those lines that become permanent contributions to the language, like Shakespeare's "star-cross'd lovers" or "Something wicked this way comes."

Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief."

I've had some great discussions about the sublime off the back of the 'freaked out by mountains' comments but it's difficult to conceptualise for kids who a) are terminally unimpressed and ii) have hardly ever left rural Hampshire.

i adore Blake
but i also think he was playing 3D chess compared w the rest of the Romantics & as such I reject his inclusion here <3
poet! artist! AND he invented his own religion!
the world was too small for him & Romanticism too narrow a category to contain him

Anyway i’m going to need to think abt this one - Shelley’s overwhelmingly great in my mind, but Byron too - his personality just wallpapers everything he touches
and Keats, god he creates actual snowflakes in poetry form
Wordsworth i am alas less familiar

i have to think on this quite a bit and maybe go lay in a field during a storm & read Virgil & idk marry some teenagers & treat them horribly

The mind of Man is fram'd even like the breath
And harmony of music. There is a dark
Invisible workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, and makes them move
In one society. Ah me! that all
The terrors, all the early miseries
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes, that all
The thoughts and feelings which have been infus'd
Into my mind, should ever have made up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!

Episode of Betwixt The Sheets which came out today. It's about Byron
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6vqVUVQDdXjCJe6Mjtyimk?si=b9fddab0bc0c4db1

never read a line of wordsworth that showed me the supposed merit

keats prob overall but i'll bedamned if ozymandias isnt the best of what's on offer from any if this lot so shelley for me trevor

imagine being known for daffodils or tintern abbey

id recluse ffs, pure shite

Tintern Abbey, heavily indebted to Coleridge's meditative poems (not like Coleridge's beloved "William" acknowledged the debt), has never failed to punch me since my AP English class in high school.

Before he turned Tory he exploited his latent reactionary energy to writing un-meditative angry sonnets like this:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

no offence with the xp alfred ofc

That daffodils poem has that wonderful line I first learned from reading Harriet the Spy in sixth grade: "...They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude."

Yep.

no offence with the xp alfred ofc

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac)

lol none taken

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

I struggle with Wordsworth's verbosity and, I can only think to call it tweeness, but the sense of this section of Tintern Abbey is right *there*.

That meditative turn in Wordsworth feels like a fight against the dry Kantian (and Coleridgean?) notion of never truly being able to see and experience the real. He hurls himself at it again and again.

Phew - saw this thread at the top and thought one of them must have died!

― meat and two vdgg (emsworth), Tuesday, March 21, 2023 1:28 AM (twenty hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

not sure why but this made me laugh really loud

darraghmac read treeship's quoted wordsworth above, it's breathtaking

love ilx poetry threads so much btw

ive read it and look ofc these things are personal else what point but he never ever reels me in and he all the time flings me out, im aware this doesnt add to the discourse and better to sing praises than hack

so

the phrasings and stops of la belle dame sans merci captivate me, demand to be uttered dramatically,

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

tho its always "hath thee" and anyone preferring the above is a liar before god & yeats

my french pronunciation is so bad that poems which interpolate it never get a fair shake from me but yeah, that one is good stuff

once you are committed to saying gapèd aloud i think you have to fully earnest goth it out tbh

one of my problems is it's my understanding that the accentual-syllabic nature of English verse is kinda disrupted when you haul in some French, where the spring is kinda different

guys i walkèd around the block today

Keats, but high school me would’ve voted Blake

I can't fuck with an opening stanza as precise as Keats' from "The Eve of St. Agnes":

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

I mean:

Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

I ran four miles today and then posted about poetry on ilx. I am the 21st century Roethke

lol

Elegy for Joan

This is easily Blake for me (although I agree that he stands apart from the other Romantics). He says so much with so little, which few of them could do. Byron probably claims second for me, then Coleridge and Shelley.

Not sure anyone can top Keats for sheer mastery of language. He breaks your heart, every time, in the precise manner he intends to.

My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

Embarrassed to admit that I don’t know any of them well enough to vote responsibly.

So far which most appeals to you?

rightly or wrongly, i think of blake as belonging to a different category, and frankly to a different league.

among the others, i'd pick coleridge. i find most of the others to be frilly and vacuous.

category yes league idk idk at all

It's the artwork as much as the poems, but Blake to me feels like a proto-outsider-artist.

Ya think?

I don't find it a useful idea for him. He's a working craftsman/artist for his entire career (life even, given he's apprenticed), goes through fat and lean periods, & ends up with a circle of younger artists around him. No shade on the outsider greats, but he's a stranger case in some ways, both in the practical banality and the shockingness of what can happen inside the framework of that London artisanal class.

I also agree about Blake existing outside this continuum. The daily scrim complicates Coleridge and Byron's poems in ways I like. I may go with Keats because he and Wordsworth were the only ones who legit changed how a line should sound and look.

But for the sake of discussion, I will propose a question: Did any of these mint an expression worth more today in the coin of everyday English than "an albatross around one's neck"?

ffs my ageing brain. I was thinking about this again re Blake & remembered 'England's green and pleasant land', which would be a local contender.

great question
was fortunate enough to study english lit at lancaster
so lot's off good local stuff for the romantics
ended up doing my dissertation on the journals of dorothy wordsworth and their treatment of nature compared to lord byron's diaries

anyway, my vote is for keats here

i just started reading coleridge for the first time in 30 years - last time was 1st year of uni & i was deeply unimpressed

my least favorite most boring lecturer recited Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
to my utter boredom & dismay and i spent decades blaming Coleridge

turns out he wasn’t to blame at all
Ancient Mariner is kinda great?

Blake, although I haven't read any of this stuff in decades

haha funny to see this thread, i was browsing RYM (which i do a lot) and ran across this gem of a review:

The Left Banke

I read an "Amazon" review online
Which said: "Two psych-pop classics on CD
Stand cased. 'Neath oft-critiqued nineties design,
One half-year's weeks' songs lie, whose euphony,
And vocals high, and harpsichord refined,
Tell its producer well a genre read
Which yet survives, stamped by melodic strings,
Tom Finn who brought her and Renee who fed:
With "Pretty Ballerina" all is clear:
"The Left Banke were the true baroque pop kings:
Look on their works, ye Zombies, and despair!"
One more Smash hit remains. Round Martin-Brown
Recordings and an eighties album rare
Montage and "Brother Louie" stand far down."

Tune. Though Byron only wrote the words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUY5m36ss0I

yay! slimy things did crawl with LEGS upon the slimy sea

they're all good but this line shd be in every poem imo

Forgot earlier to give an A+ to the “Waiting For Leftymandias” review that Kate posted.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

my uncle was named after Keats by my lit-prof grandfather, so I had to keep my vote in the family

have read a bunch of coleridge, feel bad now that I didn’t vote for him

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.