Romantic Poetry: The Lyric Revolution That Remade Verse

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1840

Romantic poetry was the central literary achievement of the Romantic movement. Across Europe, the Americas, and Russia, between roughly 1790 and 1850, poets broke the old rules of form, decorum, and diction and wrote verse of unprecedented personal intensity, natural immediacy, and imaginative reach. The English Romantic poets — Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats — are still the best-known figures of the period, but the movement produced great poets in almost every Western language, from Goethe and Hölderlin in Germany to Pushkin and Lermontov in Russia, from Hugo and Musset in France to Whitman and Dickinson in America.

The Crisis of Eighteenth-Century Verse

The verse of the mid-eighteenth century was dominated by Neoclassical ideals: order, polish, balance, decorum, and the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman models. The heroic couplet, the standard English verse form of the period, was a sharp, witty, and intellectually demanding instrument, but it was not designed to express the rough, the passionate, the visionary, or the strange. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) and An Essay on Man (1734) stand as monuments of wit and intelligence, but by the 1770s they had begun to feel narrow to a younger generation of writers.

In Germany, this crisis took a more violent form, expressed in the Sturm und Drang movement. In England, the “graveyard poets” — Thomas Gray, Edward Young, Robert Blair — were already preparing the ground for Romantic melancholy, while Thomas Chatterton, the brilliant young forger of medieval poems, embodied the Romantic fascination with the medieval past. The appearance of James Macpherson’s “translations” of the legendary Gaelic bard Ossian (1760–63), the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), and the rising vogue of the Gothic novel all pointed in the same direction.

The Birth of Romantic Poetry

The publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is usually taken as the founding event of English Romantic poetry. The volume’s second edition, in 1800, included a preface by Wordsworth that became one of the most influential statements of poetic theory ever composed. In it, Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and proposed that the language of poetry should be a “selection of the real language of men.” This was a direct challenge to the Neoclassical decorum that had governed English verse for more than a century.

The innovations of the Romantics were not only in theory but in practice. The new poets wrote about humble rural life (Wordsworth’s “Michael,” “The Ruined Cottage”), about the supernatural (Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner), about political hope and despair (Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s Don Juan), about art and mortality (Keats’s odes), about the visionary and the prophetic (Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience), and about the inner life of the artist in a hostile world.

Major Forms of Romantic Poetry

The Romantic poets did not invent new forms so much as reinvigorate old ones and develop new blends. The following were the most important.

The Lyric

The lyric — a short poem expressing a single feeling, mood, or perception — was the supreme form of the Romantic age. The great odes, songs, sonnets, and meditative lyrics of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron defined the period. The page on Romantic odes explores the high point of the Romantic lyric.

The Ballad

The ballad — a narrative folk song, usually in quatrains, telling a story of love, death, the supernatural, or adventure — was rediscovered by the Romantics and made one of the central forms of the age. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, Goethe’s Erlkönig, Pushkin’s narrative poems, and countless other works took the ballad as their model.

The Ode

The ode — a formal lyric poem on a lofty subject — was the great Romantic vehicle for visionary transport and philosophical meditation. The pages on Romantic odes explore in detail the reinvention of this form by the Romantics.

The Sonnet

The sonnet, a fixed form inherited from the Italian Renaissance, was revived with great power by the Romantics. Wordsworth, Keats, and especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning produced some of the most famous sonnet sequences in the language.

The Dramatic Monologue

The dramatic monologue — a poem in which a single speaker addresses an implied or silent listener, revealing his or her character in the process — was developed by the Romantics (especially in the work of Coleridge and Browning) and reached its full height in the Victorian era.

The Visionary or Prophetic Poem

Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and The Triumph of Life, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude belong to a specifically Romantic genre of the visionary or prophetic poem — long, often obscure, deeply personal, and yet addressed to humanity at large.

The Major Romantic Poets

A short list of central figures must include the following. Each is the subject of further pages elsewhere in the site.

In Britain

• William Wordsworth (1770–1850) — the great poet of nature, memory, and the growth of the mind. His long autobiographical poem The Prelude (published posthumously in 1850) is one of the central works of English Romanticism. His collaboration with Coleridge is treated in detail in our page on Wordsworth and Coleridge.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) — poet, critic, philosopher, and the author of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge introduced German Romantic philosophy to the English-speaking world.
• William Blake (1757–1827) — visionary poet, engraver, and prophet; author of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the prophetic books.
• Lord Byron (1788–1824) — the model for the Byronic hero and a major force in European literature from Russia to Italy.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) — lyric poet, radical political thinker, and the author of Prometheus Unbound and “Ode to the West Wind.” His revolutionary politics is treated in our page on Poetry and revolution.
• John Keats (1795–1821) — author of the great odes, “Lamia,” “Hyperion,” and many of the most beautiful short poems in the language. His premature death at twenty-five became one of the foundational myths of Romanticism.

In Germany

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) — the supreme figure of German letters, author of Faust and a vast body of lyric poetry.
• Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) — playwright, poet, and aesthetic theorist; author of the “Ode to Joy” later set to music by Beethoven.
• Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) — author of some of the greatest lyric poetry in the German language; a key influence on later philosophy and on Heidegger.
• Novalis (1772–1801) — author of the spiritual novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the visionary “Hymns to the Night.”
• Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) — lyric poet, satirist, and exile; one of the most widely read German poets of the nineteenth century.

In France

• Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) — the leading French Romantic poet of the first generation.
• Victor Hugo (1802–1885) — the towering figure of French Romantic literature.
• Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) — lyric poet and playwright, master of the poésie de la nuit.
• Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) — the founder of modern Symbolism, whose Les Fleurs du mal marked the transition from Romanticism to modernism.

In Russia

• Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) — the founding figure of modern Russian literature and the author of Eugene Onegin and the great lyric and narrative poems.
• Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) — author of A Hero of Our Time and a major lyric poet.
• Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873) — author of some of the most enduring short poems in the Russian language.

In America

• Walt Whitman (1819–1892) — author of Leaves of Grass, whose free-verse celebration of the self and the body helped inaugurate modern American poetry.
• Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) — the great recluse of Amherst, whose compressed, intense lyrics are among the supreme achievements of American verse.

Themes in Romantic Poetry

Several themes appear so often in Romantic verse that they almost define the period. They are treated in detail elsewhere in the site.

• The power of feeling and imagination — see genius and imagination.
• Nature and the natural world — see Nature in Romantic literature.
• The heroic individual — see The Romantic Hero.
• Revolution and political hope — see Poetry and Revolution.
• The past, the folk, and the medieval — see Romanticism by Country.
• The supernatural and the dark — see Romanticism in Gothic literature.

The Continuing Influence of Romantic Poetry

The Romantic poets shaped every major movement in English-language poetry that followed — the Victorians (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold), the Pre-Raphaelites, the American Transcendentalists, the French Symbolists, the modernist poets (Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens), the Confessional poets, the Beats, and many contemporary poets. To study Romantic poetry is to study the modern lyric in its first full flowering.

Further Reading

• The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge, 2003, ed. Stuart Curran).
• For primary texts: Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, and the Representative Poetry Online archive at the University of Toronto. The 24-volume Longman Anthology of British Literature is the standard print anthology for classroom use.

Related Pages

• The Romantic Ballad
• Romantic Odes
• English Romantic Poets
• Poetry and Revolution
• Romantic Literature
• Romanticism by Country
• The Legacy of Romanticism