The Romantic Poets session is always interesting since it deals with poets who inaugurated new ways of writing about nature and the human response to beauty. Four of the Big Six were represented – Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley – in addition to three women, one Italian poet and one Irish poet of the romantic period.
It was significant that Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William, who overshadowed his sister’s contributions to his poetry and eclipsed her poetry as well, was given her voice in this session.
And Emily Brontë, sister of Charlotte, whose novel Jane Eyre we read last month, appeared in a sensitive poem recounting a night long vigil watching the stars, a worthy accompaniment to van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.
Van Gogh – Starry Night
Thomas Moore, the Irish poet of the Romantic period, is even better known as a composer of music with his multivolume work A Selection of Irish Melodies. A reader recited a poem of his and discussed his important works such as A Minstrel Boy and Lalla Rookh. Another reader wanted to present him also, but was prevented by lack of an Internet connection.
Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was excerpted in a long piece by Geetha. He Was the poet labelled “Bad, Mad, and Dangerous to know“ by one of his admirers, Lady Caroline Lamb. The poem gave Byron instant fame as it sold very well before he left on his fatal expedition to win the independence of Greece from Ottoman rule. Statues of his have sprung up in Greece, and streets and schools are named after him in a grateful country:
Statue of Lord Byron in Athens
A rather tragic tale by William Wordsworth recounting the pastoral story of a farmer (Michael) who lost his land was read in excerpts; it served to remind us of what is lost by ordinary people tilling the land when urbanisation overtakes a country.
There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones!
And with that faint memorial, the tale
Ends.
One of our readers wished to illustrate how well the current Large Language Models perform by putting forward its translation of the romantic poem L’Infinito by Giacomo Leopardi; but readers uniformly declared their preference for a human translation that rendered the poem into sonnet form in English. Chalk one up for mere mortals! But we must regret not knowing the identity of the mysterious ‘Z.G.’ attributed as the author of this translation of the famous Italian poem about infinity, solitude and the sublime – although it appeared as far back as 1910 in the Oxford Book of Italian Verse.
