English Literature: The Romantics

Explore sensibility as an 18th-century movement tying acute perception to emotion and the emerging novel, shaping sentimental fiction, moral ideals, and readers’ responses.

Lyrical ballads, by Wordsworth and Coleridge, pioneers British Romanticism with language and the voice of the poor, reflecting social reality; features The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey.

William Wordsworth, father of romanticism, champions poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. He explores nature, childhood, and loss in surprised by joy and ode on intimations of immortality.

Trace the growth of a poet's mind in Wordsworth's the Prelude, a long autobiographical blank-verse poem in three editions (1799, 1805, 1850), a cornerstone of romanticism.

Learn how Samuel Taylor Coleridge shaped the English Romantic movement with Wordsworth, through the albatross of his life and works like The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

Explore Robert Southey’s arc from radical lake poet and poet laureate to a celebrated romantic, highlighting After Blenheim, pantisocracy, and the Cataract of Lodore.

Dorothy Wordsworth shapes romantic writing through her journals and minutely observing nature, influencing William Wordsworth and Coleridge; her Alfoxden and Grasmere journals reveal daily life and walks.

Explore William Blake as a romantic, visionary poet-artist who fused imagination and mysticism with political dissent. Highlight his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Jerusalem, and his London life.

Robert Burns emerges as Scotland's lyric poet, shaping romantic nationalism through Scots dialect and traditional folk songs, with enduring works like a fond kiss and auld lang syne.

Sir Walter Scott stands as a central Romantic figure in world literature, renowned for Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley, and The Lady of the Lake, and for shaping the historical novel.

Explore Lord Byron, the Byronic hero of the Romantics, through his life and works like Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan, She Walks in Beauty, and his Greek independence.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading figure of the second generation romantics, pursued radical poetry and politics, producing works like Ozymandias, music (when soft voices die), and Prometheus Unbound.

Explore John Keats as a romantic poet, famed for odes like ode to a nightingale and ode to Psyche, his short life, sensual imagery, and the idea of negative capability.

Explore the romantics with a curated reading list and free access to texts on Poetry.com and Project Gutenberg, as you conclude this engaging course.