  "Now appeared the English romantic school, a sect of 'dissenters in poetry,' who spoke out aloud, kept themselves close together, and repelled settled minds by the audacity and novelty of their theories. They had violently broken with tradition, and leaped over all classical culture, to take their models from the Renaissance and the middle-age. They sought, in the old national ballads and ancient poetry of foreign lands, the fresh and primitive accent which had been wanting in classical literature, and whose presence seemed to them to be a sign of truth and beauty. They proposed to adapt to poetry the ordinary language of conversation, such as is spoken in the middle and lower classes, and to replace studied phrases and a lofty vocabulary by natural tones and plebeian words. In place of the classic mould, they tried stanzas, sonnets, ballads, blank verse, with the roughness and subdivisions of the primitive poets.... Some had culled gigantic legends, piled up dreams, ransacked the East, Greece, Arabia, the Middle Ages, and overloaded the human imagination with hues and fancies from every clime. Others had buried themselves in metaphysics and moral philosophy, had mused indefatigably on the condition of man, and spent their lives on the sublime and the monotonous. Others, making a medley of crime and heroism, had conducted, through darkness and flashes of lightning, a train of contorted and terrible figures, desperate with remorse, relieved by their grandeur. Men wanted to rest after so many efforts and so much success. On the going out of the imaginative, sentimental, and Satanic school, Tennyson appeared exquisite. All the forms and ideas which had pleased them were found in him, but purified, modulated, set in a splendid style. He completed an age."—Taine. Poets of the Nineteenth Century.William Wordsworth (1770-1850). See biographical note, page 52. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"; "The Lady of the Lake"; "Marmion"; "The Lord of the Isles"; short poems. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). See biographical note, page 65. Robert Southey (1774-1843). "Thalaba"; "Roderick, the last of the Goths"; "Joan of Arc"; "Madoc"; "The Curse of Kehama"; numerous short poems. Charles Lamb (1775-1834). Chiefly short poems. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). "Gebir"; and other poems. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844). "Gertrude of Wyoming"; "The Pleasures of Hope"; short poems. Thomas Moore (1779-1852). "Irish Melodies"; "Lalla Rookh"; "Rhymes on the Road"; "The Loves of the Angels," etc. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). "Francesca Rimini"; "A Legend of Florence"; "Stories in Verse," etc. Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall") (1787-1874). "A Sicilian Story"; "English Songs," etc. Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel) (1788-1824). "Childe Harold"; "The Giaour"; "Bride of Abydos"; "The Corsair"; "Lara"; "Hebrew Melodies"; "Siege of Corinth"; "Parisina"; "Manfred"; "Don Juan," etc. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). See biographical note, page 81. John Keats (1795-1821). See biographical note, page 93. Thomas Hood (1799-1845). Numerous short poems, chiefly humorous. Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). "Lays of Ancient Rome." Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861). "Prometheus Bound"; "Casa Guidi Windows"; "Sonnets from the Portuguese"; "Aurora Leigh"; "Poems before Congress"; "Last Poems." Alfred Tennyson (Lord Tennyson) (1809-). See biographical note, page 35. Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) (1809-1885). "Historical Poems"; "Poetry for the People"; "Poems of Many Years." Robert Browning (1812-1889). "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"; "Men and Women"; "The Ring and the Book"; "Balaustion's Adventure"; "Fifine at the Fair"; "Aristophanes' Apology," etc. William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813-1865). "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers"; "Ballads of Scotland," etc. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861). "The Bothie"; "Ambarvalia," etc. Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). "Andromeda"; many short poems. Matthew Arnold (1822-1889). "The Strayed Reveller and other Poems"; "Balder." Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-1864). "Legends and Lyrics"; "A Chaplet of Verses." Robert Bulwer-Lytton ("Owen Meredith") (1831-1892). "Lucile"; "Marah," etc. |
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