If the phrase “romantic poems” conjures up something along the lines of “roses are red, violets are blue,” then come back for a later post. Today’s post about Romantic poems refers to those poems written by the poets of the English Romantic movement, poets who changed both literature and the concept of the poet forever.

Although the word “romantic” did not begin to apply to these poets until the late Victorian-era, the poems of the six major English Romantic poets – Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Wordsworth – united themselves contemporaneously. Writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Wordsworth eschewed the formal, didactic language of poets past by creating works that relied on intuition and emotion rather than reason and intellect. The term “romantic” came to be associated with this movement in the sense that these were poems of the heart and soul.

Adding to the romanticism of these poets was the fact that the best known of the Romantics – Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge – were known for flouting 19th century conventions. Coleridge was an opium user. Shelley abandoned his first wife, who later drowned, to elope with author Mary Shelley. Byron lived a life not unlike the Don Juan of one of his most famous works. The tragic young deaths of Shelley, Keats, and Byron further cemented their romantic images.

The Romantic poets are responsible for some of the most famous poems in the English language. Among them are:

Keats: “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”
Shelley: “Prometheus Unbound,” “Music, When Soft Voices Die,” “Ode to the West Wind”
Blake: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “The Tyger,” “The Little Girl Lost”
Wordsworth: “Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,”
“The Prelude”
Coleridge: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel”
Byron: “Don Juan,” “She Walked in Beauty,” “When We Two Parted”

Yet it was only Byron who seemed to foretell the reputation as the leaders of a real or imagined Romantic movement that these poets would later gain, in his poem, aptly titled, “To Romance,” excerpted here: