By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The sonnet was popular among the Romantic poets. John Keats wrote many, including the celebrated ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias’; and a pioneering female poet, Charlotte Turner Smith, was both a proto-Romantic poet and the person often credited with causing a revival of the sonnet among English poets.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I travelled among unknown men’ is one of the ‘Lucy’ poems written by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Written in the quatrain form roughly resembling the ballad metre, linking these poems to the vernacular tradition of Border Ballads, ‘I travelled among unknown men’ is one of Wordsworth’s most accessible famous poems. Yet it is not without its difficulties. What follows is the poem, along with some notes towards an analysis of it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was originally the name of an anonymous fourteenth-century English poem about a cruel woman, but the title ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is more commonly associated with John Keats’s poem which tells the story of a knight-at-arms who was seduced by a woman who was more fairy than human (you know the sort of thing), lured back to her cave, and then abandoned on the cold hillside.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Little Black Boy’ is a poem from William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence. Before we proceed to an analysis of Blake’s poem, here’s a reminder of ‘The Little Black Boy’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
William Wordsworth’s great long autobiographical poem in blank verse, The Prelude, has many great passages, and this is one of the best, from the first book of the poem, describing the poet’s schooldays and his time among nature. The description of the hill looming up as a young Wordsworth rows his boat – finding freedom on the open water – comes close to that key Romantic concept of the Sublime. If this excerpt whets your appetite for the whole poem, you can read that here.