Ten Famous Romantic Poets
The Romantic movement in Britain in the late 18th century embraced a deep interest in Nature as a source of inspiration for poetry. It emphasised the primacy of the individual's expression of imagination and emotion. Furthermore, it departed from all types of classicism and rebelled against social rules and conventions.
Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) one of the foremost poets of her time
While the names on everybody’s lips are those of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, there were female poets too in abundance during the Romantic period. Women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were respected and widely read practitioners of the art of poetry. Hemans was a bestselling author of the nineteenth century, and Baillie, the foremost playwright of her time.
Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 - 1806), Romantic poet and novelist
The Romantic Poets were a varied lot. Wordsworth, you might call almost an establishment figure with his sober ways and accession to Laureate status. Blake was a mystic and deeply religious thinker, though inimical to established religion and its pomps. Shelley was a free-thinking poet and pamphleteer who even got rusticated from Oxford University for an essay The Necessity of Atheism. Dying young was the common fate of several Romantic poets: Keats, Shelley and Byron, but like other geniuses they accomplished incandescent work by their early twenties. Because Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a radical essay to preface their joint collection called Lyrical Ballads, they are considered the theorists and elder statesmen of the Romantic era. However, the letters of Keats can also be mined for a deep understanding of his insights into poetry and the creative process. So too Shelley's seminal essay A Defence of Poetry lays out the dominant role of poetry in language and how poetry enables the mind to realise “a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”
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The number of readers selecting a poet was distributed as follows: Wordsworth (3), Blake (2), Shelley (2), Keats (2), and one each for Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, Byron, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alexander Pushkin, to make 15 readers in all – a record number for our Poetry readings.
