I was dead keen on the Romantics for a few years in me yoof. I can't remember much of what I read about them but one thing I would say, following on from Jack Fear's point about Blake, is that it is helpful to draw a line between the older and younger generations. Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth were about 20 years older than Byron, Shelley and Keats, and they were also more settled and successful. The younger three were the ones who had the tragic deaths and are the more obvious poster boys for the movement.
Of the older group I loved Coleridge. Much more dark and dreamy and he had great rhythm. "The Rime of the Ancient mariner" was the first proper poem I read, at 10 years old, and it hooked me for poetry ever since. The ballad rhythm is mesmerizing. I never got into Blake ("Tiger tiger burning bright, in the forest of the night" - fuck off), and I found Wordsworth simply a bland pompous Jobsworth. I remember Rothkoid summarizing the Prelude to our professor in two lines: "I am the man. And when I think about my youth, I was the man then as well." Nuff sed.
And of the younger I always adored Keats, again mostly for the delicacy of his rhythms. He is my favourite sonnet writer of all, probably equalled by Shakespeare. Well Will wrote more consistently anyway, but Keats's best ones are wonderful. His best lines have a sway and lilt like few poets ever manage. Reading about his devotion to literature always got to me. His need to earn a living fought with his desire to be free to write as he wished, and I loved reading about him spending his time studying Shakespeare, and being moved to write poems about it, e.g. "On Sitting Down to read King Lear Once Again." Maybe it's just pretentious, but reading this stuff as an 18 year old wannabe writer, his devotion to studying and practising his art always hit the right note for me.
I don't mind Shelley but was never really hooked, though "Adonais" is genius. And I never got around to reading much Byron as he struck me as too jocular and annoying, though I keep planning to give Don Juan a go. Mind you, I guess he should be given his due as he followed his ideology and went off to fight for Greek independence, where he died of illness. They have his sword in the War Museum in Athens and I tried to see it when in Greece last year but that section was closed for renovations, like most of the country at the moment. Oh well.
So yeah, imho the youngers have the life stories, and I think they have more of the lyrical ability as well, especially Johnny Keats:
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art-
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
No-yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death. |
