Key Figures of English Enlightenment and Romantic Poetry
Alexander Pope: English essayist, critic, satirist, and one of the greatest poets of the Enlightenment. Alexander Pope wrote his first verses at the age of 12. His breakthrough work, An Essay on Criticism (1711) appeared when he was twenty-three. It included the famous line “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Pope’s physical defects made him an easy target for heartless mockery, but he was also considered a leading literary critic and the epitome of English Neoclassicism.
Notable Works:
- Pastorals
- An Essay on Criticism
- The Rape of the Lock
- The Temple of Fame
Thomas Gray: He was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. The Elegy was recognised immediately for its beauty and skill. It contains many phrases which have entered the common English lexicon, either on their own or as quoted in other works. These include: “The Paths of Glory”, “Celestial fire”, “Some mute inglorious Milton”, “Far from the Madding Crowd”, “The unlettered muse”, “Kindred spirit”.
William Blake: British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. He joined for a time the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in London and considered Newtonian science to be superstitious nonsense. Mocking criticism and misunderstanding shadowed Blake’s career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance.
Notable Works:
- The Complete Writings of William Blake
- The Poems of William Blake
- The Notebook of William Blake
William Wordsworth: British poet, who spent his life in the Lake District of Northern England. William Wordsworth started with Samuel Taylor Coleridge the English Romantic movement with their collection Lyrical Ballads (1798). When many poets still wrote about ancient heroes in grandiloquent style, Wordsworth focused on nature, children, the poor, common people, and used ordinary words to express his personal feelings. His definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotion recollected in tranquillity” was shared by a number of his followers.
Notable Works:
- An Evening Walk
- Descriptive Sketches
- The Borderers: A Tragedy
- Lyrical Ballads
- Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Lord Byron: The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist. Byron was famous in his lifetime for his affairs with society women, Mediterranean boys, and prostitutes. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of the ‘Byronic hero’ – a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable sin in his past. Byron’s influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.
Notable Works:
- The Prophecy of Dante
- The Two Foscari
- Sardanapalus
- Cain
- Heaven and Earth
Percy B. Shelley: English Romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and conservative values. Shelley was considered, with his friend Lord Byron, a pariah for his lifestyle. He drew no essential distinction between poetry and politics, and his work reflected the radical ideas and revolutionary optimism of the era. Like many poets of his day, Shelley employed mythological themes and figures from Greek poetry that gave an exalted tone for his visions.
Notable Works:
- Zastrozzi: A Romance
- Original poetry by Victor and Cazire
- Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson
John Keats: English lyric poet, the archetype of the Romantic writer. While still in good health, Keats emphasized the importance of having knowledge of the surrounding world, instead of focusing on hermetic speculations. Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination with death and decay. Most of his best work appeared in one year.
Notable Works:
- Imitation of Spenser
- On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
- Poems
- Endymion: A Poetic Romance
- Hyperion (unfinished)
Robert Browning: English poet, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue. Robert Browning was long unsuccessful as a poet and financially dependent upon his family until he was well into adulthood. In his best works, people from the past reveal their thoughts and lives as if speaking or thinking aloud.
Notable Works:
- Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession
- Paracelsus
- Strafford (play)