English Romantic poetry

In 1798 two friends published anonymously a book of ballads written, they said, in the language really spoken by men: that is the beginning of English romanticism. Wordsworth put vagrants and peasants into it, Coleridge a sailor who kills an albatross and drags his guilt across every sea. The next generation burned faster: Byron invented the accursed hero and died in Greece, Shelley drowned at twenty-nine after seeing in a desert the ruins of a forgotten king, Keats died at twenty-five leaving odes behind.

works 6

• PoetrySongs of Innocence and of ExperienceWilliam Blake · 1794Songs of childhood, then their reverse: the lamb first, the tiger afterwards.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryLyrical BalladsWilliam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1798Two friends publish together, anonymously, poems written in the language of everyday speech.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryThe Rime of the Ancient MarinerSamuel Taylor Coleridge · 1798An old sailor stops a wedding guest on his way and will not let him go.Literature
• PoetryManfredLord Byron · 1817A man alone in the mountains demands from the powers he has summoned something they cannot give.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryOzymandiasPercy Bysshe Shelley · 1818Two legs of stone standing in the sand, and at their feet a shattered face.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryOde to a NightingaleJohn Keats · 1819The song of a nightingale, on a spring night, set against human suffering and death.LiteraturePublic domain