Who are the Big Six English Romantic poets?

William Blake (1757–1827), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and John Keats (1795–1821). The first three are the 'first generation'; the last three are the 'second generation.'

Why are they called the Big Six?

The grouping is a critical convention, not a self-conscious grouping. F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) and M.H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism (1971) helped fix the six as a canon. Earlier nineteenth-century readers would more often have spoken of 'the Lake poets' (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey) or 'the Satanic school' (Byron, Shelley) than of the Big Six as such.

Who are the 'Lake poets'?

The 'Lake poets' were Wordsworth, Coleridge, and (in a looser sense) Robert Southey, who lived in the English Lake District in the early 1800s. The label was originally a sneer (used by the Edinburgh Review in 1817) but became a fixed part of the period's vocabulary.

Is Jane Austen a Romantic?

It depends whom you ask. Austen's irony, her classical restraint, and her social comedy have often been read as a counterweight to the Romantic exuberance of her contemporaries. The editor's view is that Austen is in a complex and productive relationship with Romanticism, not outside it. Her late novels are, in many ways, a critique of the Romantic imagination from inside.

Why did so many of them die young?

Keats died of tuberculosis at twenty-five, Shelley drowned at twenty-nine, Byron at thirty-six, and Blake lived to seventy but spent his last years in obscurity. The early deaths became part of the Romantic myth of the unappreciated genius, and helped secure the canonical status of the second generation in particular. Tuberculosis was, in the early nineteenth century, a major cause of death in young adults.

The Editors of Romanticism.xyz. Last reviewed: 13 June 2026.

The English Romantic Poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats

The “Big Six” English Romantic poets — William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats — are the most familiar figures of the Romantic movement in the English-speaking world. Their lives were marked by extraordinary friendships, fierce rivalries, political radicalism, religious and erotic scandal, early death, and an almost unmatched intensity of literary production. Their works — the Lyrical Ballads and Prometheus Unbound, the great odes of 1819, the long autobiographical poems, the visionary prophecies — remain at the heart of the English poetic tradition and continue to be read, studied, and translated across the world.

This page offers a structured introduction to the six great English Romantic poets, with links to the specific works and biographies treated in more detail elsewhere in the site.

William Blake (1757–1827)

William Blake was the most singular of the English Romantics — a visionary poet, engraver, and prophet who lived much of his life on the margins of literary London, working as a printmaker and producing extraordinary works of illustrated poetry that combined text and image in unprecedented ways. His major works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789/1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), Milton (1804–11), and Jerusalem (1804–20). The page on Genius and Imagination treats Blake’s role in the Romantic conception of the artist.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

Wordsworth was the great English Romantic poet of nature, memory, and the growth of the mind. His most famous works include Lyrical Ballads (1798, with Coleridge), the great odes of 1802–07, the long autobiographical poem The Prelude (1850), and the Excursion (1814). His preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) became one of the most influential statements of poetic theory ever composed. The page on Wordsworth and Coleridge treats the close but often troubled friendship and collaboration of the two poets.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

Coleridge was the great English Romantic poet of the supernatural, the conversational lyric, and the philosophical imagination. His most famous poems include “Kubla Khan” (1816), “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798, with Lyrical Ballads), and the great conversation poems “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (1797), “Frost at Midnight” (1798), and “Dejection: An Ode” (1802). His Biographia Literaria (1817) is one of the most influential works of Romantic criticism. The page on Coleridge’s Ballads treats the great narrative poems of the Romantic ballad revival.

Lord Byron (1788–1824)

Byron was the great English Romantic poet of the heroic outsider and the political exile. His most famous works include the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), the “Turkish Tales” (The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, 1813–14), Manfred (1817), Cain (1821), and the unfinished Don Juan (1819–24). His personal life — the famous love affairs, the rumors of incest, the exile from England in 1816, the death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 — became part of the Romantic myth. Byron was the model for the Byronic hero, a character type that influenced European literature from Pushkin and Lermontov to Stendhal and Musset.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

Shelley was the great English Romantic poet of radical politics and visionary lyric. His most famous works include Prometheus Unbound (1820), “Ode to the West Wind” (1820), “To a Skylark” (1820), “Ozymandias” (1818), The Cenci (1819), and Adonais (1821), his great pastoral elegy on the death of Keats. His political writings — The Masque of Anarchy (1832), A Defence of Poetry (1840), A Philosophical View of Reform (1820) — make him one of the major political poets of the nineteenth century. The page on Poetry and Revolution treats the political dimension of Shelley’s work.

John Keats (1795–1821)

Keats was the great English Romantic poet of beauty, mortality, and the imagination. His most famous works include the great odes of 1819 (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” “To Autumn”), the sonnets (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”), the narrative poems “Lamia,” “Isabella,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and the unfinished epic Hyperion. The page on Keats’s premature death treats the biographical events that turned Keats into one of the foundational myths of Romanticism.

The Lives of the Poets

The lives of the six great English Romantic poets are, in their own right, among the great stories of English literature. Several common patterns run through them:

The personal friendship and rivalry — the close, productive, and often troubled relationships among the poets, especially between Wordsworth and Coleridge, between Shelley and Byron, and among Keats, Hunt, and the younger generation.
The political radicalism — the political radicalism of the younger Romantics, especially Shelley, Byron, and Keats, and the disillusionment with revolutionary politics that marked Wordsworth’s later life.
The early death — the early deaths of Keats (at twenty-five), Shelley (at twenty-nine), and Byron (at thirty-six) all became part of the Romantic myth of the unappreciated or persecuted genius.
The transformation of the poet into a legendary figure — the way the lives of the Romantic poets became part of the cultural mythology of the nineteenth century, with each poet acquiring a distinct “image” (Wordsworth as the sage of the lakes, Coleridge as the brilliant opium-eater, Byron as the dark, brooding rebel, Shelley as the ethereal radical, Keats as the doomed poet of beauty) that often had as much to do with later reception as with the actual lives.

The Long Influence of the English Romantic Poets

The six great English Romantic poets shaped every major development in English-language poetry and thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Victorians, the Pre-Raphaelites, the American Transcendentalists, the French Symbolists, the modernists, the contemporary poets — all drew on the Romantic inheritance. The Romantic poets continue to be among the most read, most studied, and most translated poets in the English language.

In This Section

Keats's Premature Death

An exploration of the early death of John Keats, one of the great tragic events of the Romantic age, and the legacy it left for the Romantic myth of …

Wordsworth and Coleridge

An exploration of the close, productive, and often troubled friendship and collaboration of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.