The origins of Romantic Poetry though nominally confined to a small group of poets in England had such a vast influence that its effervescence may be detected in the poetry of nations across Europe. So special is the delight in their poetry that KRG devotes a whole session every year to mining the untold riches of what those poets left behind, though several of them died very young.
The usual suspects were represented – Wordsworth, Keats, Byron – but so were three women poets and a dashing representative from Spain. It was a thrilling experience. The joy comes through in the accounts supplied by several readers, especially in the verse casually appended to a letter of Keats to a friend where the poet recounts his spontaneous reaction to the song of a thrush floating into his study through a window.
The song thrush
The poem by Wordsworth concerned a hero of Haiti whose leadership in mounting a revolt of the slaves against their exploitative slave-owning plantation masters won the independence of the island (western part) from France – but, at the cost of Toussaint L'Ouverture’s imprisonment and death in a French prison. The poem excited discussion about the subsequent impoverishing debt imposed on Haitians by France to compensate the French landowners for their losses.
Lord Byron, Cleaned up Image of a large statue of Lord Byron erected in the courtyard of Byronei Messolonghi. The statue shows him in Greek costume of the time, standing, gazing at the waters
A poem by Byron demonstrated how committed he was to the cause of the independence of Greece from Ottoman rule. HIs poem was written only a few months before his death from a mosquito-borne fever in Messolonghi – the historic town in located about 250 km west of Athens on the edge of a rich ecological lagoon. Byron seems to have had a presentiment of his death as he ponders his thirty-sixth birthday in the poem, filled with a determination to fight on.
It was invigorating to listen to the Spanish verses of Bécquer, the very embodiment of the spirit of Romanticism in the soil of Sevilla. His famous Rima LIII was recited by Thomo, attempting to learn Spanish through the effort of decoding the pathos of the poem.
Read on and savour the pleasure of reading the Romantic Poets … to whom KRG returns every August.
