100 Fun Facts About Romantic Poets

Who wrote the poem 'She Walks in Beauty'?

Lord Byron wrote it in 1814 after seeing his cousin's wife at a London party, dressed in mourning with spangles on her gown.

Shelley's second wife, Mary, wrote which novel?

Frankenstein began in 1816 as her answer to Lord Byron's challenge that each of his guests write a ghost story; she was 18 at the time.

Which bird does the Ancient Mariner shoot?

Albatross: the crew hang the dead bird round the Mariner's neck, which gave English the phrase 'an albatross around one's neck' for a burden of guilt.

Who wrote 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'To a Skylark'?

Percy Shelley wrote the West Wind ode in Florence in autumn 1819, using the storm-bringing wind as an image of the political change he hoped was coming.

Who wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?

John Keats, his housemate Charles Brown recalled, wrote the nightingale ode in a single spring morning, sitting under a plum tree in their Hampstead garden.

Who wrote 'The Tyger' and Songs of Innocence?

William Blake later paired Songs of Innocence with darker companion poems, Songs of Experience, to show what he called 'the two contrary states of the human soul'.

Wordsworth is associated with which English region?

The Lake District was where he was born and spent most of his life, and besides the poems he wrote a travellers' guidebook to its scenery.

Which 1798 collection is generally said to have begun English Romanticism?

Lyrical Ballads broke with ornate verse: the preface added to its 1800 edition argued that poetry should be written in 'the real language of men'.

Which poet co-wrote with Coleridge the 1798 collection that launched English Romanticism?

William Wordsworth wrote most of its poems, ending the book with 'Tintern Abbey', composed after a walking tour of the Wye valley with his sister.

Who wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned it as a poem to sell to a magazine, to help pay for a walking tour over Somerset's Quantock Hills in November 1797.

Keats died at 25 of which disease?

Tuberculosis had already killed his brother Tom, whom Keats nursed; trained in medicine, he saw his own first cough of blood and called it his 'death warrant'.

How did Shelley die in 1822?

Drowned in a boating accident: a squall overwhelmed his new sailing boat off the Italian coast, and his body, washed ashore ten days later, was cremated on the beach.

Coleridge struggled for most of his life with addiction to which drug?

Opium, usually taken as laudanum, was first given to him as medicine, and he said 'Kubla Khan' came to him in a sleep brought on by a dose.

Byron died in 1824 after joining which conflict?

Greek War of Independence: he put 4,000 pounds of his own money into the Greek fleet, died of fever at Missolonghi, and was mourned in memorial services across Greece.

Keats died in which city in 1821?

Rome was where his doctors sent him in hope of a warmer climate; he arrived in November 1820 and died there three months later, nursed by the painter Joseph Severn.

Romantic poetry was a reaction against which earlier style?

Neoclassicism prized order, balance and reason on classical models; the Romantics answered with emotion, imagination and the individual.

Wordsworth defined poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful' what?

Feelings, though not raw ones: the same sentence of his 1800 preface says poetry 'takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity'.

Which woman of science was Byron's daughter?

Ada Lovelace never knew him: her mother left with her weeks after the birth, and within months Byron had sailed from England, never to return.

Byron said 'I awoke one morning and found myself' what?

Famous was the word: the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage had just appeared in March 1812, and the first printing sold out in three days.

What was the name of Wordsworth's sister, the diarist?

Dorothy kept a journal at Grasmere, and her entry on the daffodils the pair saw beside Ullswater in April 1802 fed his best-known poem.

Besides poetry, Blake worked professionally in which trade?

Engraving was his living: apprenticed at 14 to the engraver James Basire, he later devised his own relief-etching method to print his poems and pictures together.

Byron attended which university?

Cambridge: at Trinity College he kept a pet bear, reputedly because the rules that banned dogs said nothing about bears.

What is generally considered Wordsworth's magnum opus?

The Prelude was published only after his death in 1850, and it was his widow who gave it that title; he had called it simply the poem to Coleridge.

To whom does the Ancient Mariner tell his tale?

A wedding guest, stopped on his way in to the feast, is held by the old sailor's 'glittering eye' and goes home 'a sadder and a wiser man'.

Who was Keats's fiancée, to whom he wrote his love letters?

Fanny Brawne lived in the other half of his Hampstead house; when he sailed for Italy in 1820, he knew he would probably never see her again.

Byron's Villa Diodati, scene of the 1816 ghost-story contest, overlooked which lake?

Lake Geneva: kept indoors by the incessant rain of 1816, the 'year without a summer', the party read German ghost stories aloud and set out to write their own.

Byron was born with what physical condition?

A deformed foot left him lame, and he made up for it with boxing and swimming, crossing the Hellespont itself in 1810.

Which Blake poem became the words of the hymn 'Jerusalem'?

'And did those feet in ancient time' comes from the preface to his long poem Milton, not from his poem called Jerusalem; Hubert Parry set it to music in 1916.

Who is said to have called Byron 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'?

Lady Caroline Lamb is said to have coined the phrase soon after meeting him in 1812; when their affair ended, she turned him into the villain of her novel Glenarvon.

Which critical phrase did Coleridge coin?

Suspension of disbelief comes from his Biographia Literaria of 1817, where he explained how readers could accept the supernatural in his poems for a moment of 'poetic faith'.

Coleridge said the writing of 'Kubla Khan' was interrupted by whom?

A person from Porlock, he claimed, called on business and broke the spell; the fragment stayed unpublished until 1816, when Lord Byron urged him to print it.

Ozymandias is the Greek name for which pharaoh?

Ramesses II: a colossal stone head of the pharaoh, the Younger Memnon, was on its way to the British Museum when the sonnet was written, and reached London only afterwards.

Which term did Keats coin for being 'in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts'?

Negative capability was his name, in an 1817 letter to his brothers, for a gift he saw in Shakespeare: living with doubt 'without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'.

Keats's gravestone reads 'Here lies One whose Name was writ in' what?

Water: he asked for a stone with no name on it, only that line; his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Brown kept the line but added an inscription of their own above it.

Which pamphlet got Shelley expelled from Oxford in 1811?

The Necessity of Atheism was posted to every bishop and head of college at Oxford; called before his college's fellows, he refused to say whether he had written it and was expelled.

Wordsworth became Poet Laureate in 1843 on the death of which fellow Lake Poet?

Robert Southey had been laureate for thirty years; Wordsworth, who took over in his seventies, had by then all but stopped writing poems.

What is the title of Shelley's elegy for Keats?

Adonais blames Keats's death on a savage review of his poetry, a story Shelley believed, though the real cause was illness.

Shelley wrote 'The Mask of Anarchy' in response to which 1819 event?

Peterloo Massacre: local militia charged a peaceful reform rally in Manchester, and Shelley's furious poem was judged too dangerous to print until 1832, ten years after his death.

Which long Keats poem did Blackwood's dismiss as 'imperturbable drivelling idiocy'?

Endymion opens 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'; the reviewer, John Gibson Lockhart, told the medically trained Keats to go 'back to the shop', to his pills and ointments.

Byron's Don Juan is written in which Italian verse form?

Ottava rima, eight lines rhyming ABABABCC, came to him from Italian comic verse; he tried it out in Beppo and used its closing couplet for comic deflation.

What did Coleridge and Southey call their planned utopian commune in Pennsylvania?

Pantisocracy never left the planning stage, but it bound the two friends together: in 1795 they married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker.

Which physician at Byron's Villa Diodati gathering wrote The Vampyre?

John Polidori, Byron's young doctor, saw his tale printed in 1819 as a new work by Lord Byron, to the annoyance of both men.

Shelley wrote 'Ozymandias' in friendly competition with which writer?

Horace Smith, a stockbroker and friend, published his own 'Ozymandias' in the same paper three weeks after Shelley's, signed only with his initials.

A celebrated Keats sonnet describes discovering Homer through whose English translation?

George Chapman's Elizabethan Homer kept Keats and a friend reading until dawn; he walked home, wrote the sonnet, and had it on the friend's breakfast table by ten.

Which line opens Wordsworth's poem about golden daffodils?

'I wandered lonely as a cloud' bends the facts: he was not alone but walking beside Ullswater with his sister, whose journal describes the flowers dancing in the wind.

Byron opens Don Juan by announcing 'I want a' what?

Hero is the word: finding no true one in his own age, he takes the legendary seducer Don Juan and makes him a young man more seduced than seducing.

Whom did Blake throw out of his garden before his 1804 sedition trial?

A soldier swore that Blake had damned the King while marching him out; the jury acquitted Blake, who took revenge by writing the man into his poem Jerusalem.

Byron's grandfather, an admiral, earned which nickname at sea?

Foul-Weather Jack, Vice-Admiral John Byron, met gales and storms on voyage after voyage; as a young midshipman he had survived the wreck of HMS Wager off Chile.

In Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', where does the Khan decree his 'stately pleasure-dome'?

Xanadu is Shangdu, the summer capital of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan; Coleridge had been reading about it in an old travel book just before he fell asleep.

Who was Blake's wife, who printed and coloured his books alongside him?

Catherine Boucher could not sign her own name in the marriage register; Blake taught her to read and write, and then to work beside him.

As a child on Peckham Rye in London, William Blake claimed to have seen a tree filled with what?

Angels, their bright wings covering every bough like stars, were what the young Blake reported. Only his mother's pleading saved him from a thrashing by his father for telling a lie.

Barred by college rules from keeping his dog, the student Lord Byron kept which tame animal instead?

A bear was not mentioned in the college statutes, so the authorities had no grounds to complain, and Byron even suggested applying for a fellowship on the animal's behalf.

Which part of Percy Shelley is said to have survived his beach cremation and been kept by his widow?

His heart, or what was taken for it, resisted the flames and was pulled from the pyre by a friend. After Mary Shelley died, its remains were found in her desk in a silk parcel.

What happened to Lord Byron's unpublished memoirs at his publisher's London office a month after he died?

They were burned at the offices of John Murray, the firm that had published Byron's poetry, a loss that has distorted biographies of him ever since.

In John Keats's poem 'Isabella', the heroine buries her murdered lover's head in a pot of which herb?

Basil is the herb Isabella tends obsessively over the buried head after her brothers kill Lorenzo. Keats adapted the grim tale from Boccaccio's Decameron.

Percy Shelley's 1813 pamphlet 'A Vindication of Natural Diet' is an early English argument for which cause?

Vegetarianism was Shelley's own practice from March 1812, and he argued that a plant-based diet was essential for bodily health, moral virtue and social justice.

Lord Byron wrote his poem 'Darkness' in 1816, a sunless summer caused by which volcano's eruption?

Mount Tambora erupted in the Dutch East Indies in 1815, casting enough sulphur into the atmosphere to cool the globe. Nobody in Europe at the time knew the cause.

In the poem 'The Tyger', the speaker asks what immortal hand or eye could frame the tiger's fearful what?

Symmetry is the word, and by the final stanza the speaker's question has shifted from who could frame such a creature to who would dare.

In 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Death and Life-in-Death play which game for the crew's souls?

Dice decide it: Death wins the lives of the crew, while Life-in-Death wins the mariner himself, a prize she considers the more valuable.

Percy Shelley's second wife was the daughter of which women's rights pioneer, who died days after the birth?

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died 11 days after the birth. Her daughter grew up reading her books and was raised to cherish her memory.

The poem 'The Tyger' appeared in which 1794 collection, the darker companion to its author's book of Innocence?

Songs of Experience followed his 1789 volume, and Blake then combined the two sets of poems into one book as showing the two contrary states of the human soul.

William Blake's book of provocative 'Proverbs' describes a marriage between Heaven and which other place?

Hell, in Blake's telling, is not a place of punishment but a source of unrepressed energy, set against an authoritarian and regulated Heaven.

William Blake's 'Auguries of Innocence' opens with the idea of seeing a whole world in a grain of what?

Sand holds a world and a wild flower holds a heaven in the opening lines. Blake left the poem in a notebook, and it was not published until 1863.

In William Blake's 'A Poison Tree', the speaker's nursed anger grows into a tree bearing which bright fruit?

An apple shines on the tree until the speaker's enemy steals into the garden by night; in the morning he lies outstretched beneath it.

Which child labourers, sold into the trade as young as four, are the subject of two William Blake poems?

Chimney sweeps, wanted for their small size, appear in a poem of the same title in each of Blake's two best-known collections, the first in 1789 and the second in 1794.

William Wordsworth's 1798 meditation on revisiting the banks of the River Wye is known by the name of which ruin?

Tintern Abbey is how the poem's long title is usually shortened, although the building itself never appears in the poem, which was composed a few miles upstream.

Which political upheaval did the young William Wordsworth witness and embrace in 1791 before turning against it?

The French Revolution enchanted Wordsworth when he visited in November 1791, but the Reign of Terror that followed left him thoroughly disillusioned.

Which sight in the sky delights the speaker of the short Wordsworth poem that calls the child father of the man?

A rainbow moves the speaker as an adult just as it did when he was a boy. Wordsworth wrote the short poem on the night of March 26, 1802.

William Wordsworth's great ode of 1807 draws 'intimations' of what from recollections of early childhood?

Immortality is glimpsed, the ode suggests, in the radiant way a child sees the world, and the poem mourns the fading of that vision in adult life.

William Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper', about a girl singing at harvest, followed an 1803 stay in which country?

Scotland supplied the setting, and the words of the reaper's song are incomprehensible to the speaker, which leaves him free to dwell on the beauty of the tune alone.

The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' closes with the urn's message that beauty is the same thing as what?

Truth and beauty are declared one and the same, though the poem leaves it ambiguous whether the urn or the narrator is really speaking those final words.

Percy Shelley's essay 'A Defence of Poetry' ends by calling poets the unacknowledged what of the world?

Legislators is the essay's closing word on poets. Shelley wrote it in February and March 1821, then put it aside and never completed it.

Percy Shelley's four-act verse drama of 1820 imagines the release of which Titan chained to a rock face?

Prometheus is freed in Shelley's play, but unlike the ancient version by Aeschylus there is no reconciliation between the Titan and Jupiter.

In 1810 Lord Byron swam which waterway between Europe and Asia, inspired by the myth of Leander?

The Hellespont, now better known as the Dardanelles, was crossed by Byron and a lieutenant of marines on 3 May 1810 while their ship lay at anchor awaiting permission to dock.

Which Scottish poet, regarded as a pioneer of Romanticism, wrote 'To a Mouse' and 'Auld Lang Syne'?

Robert Burns wrote 'Auld Lang Syne' in 1788, and it is often sung at Hogmanay, the last day of the year. His 'Scots Wha Hae' long served as an unofficial national anthem.

Which author of 'The Lady of the Lake' and 'Marmion' turned down the post of Poet Laureate in 1813?

Walter Scott declined, judging the appointment a poisoned chalice now that the Laureateship had fallen into disrepute, and a duke he consulted advised him to stay free of it.

In Percy Shelley's 'Ozymandias', which part of the king's ruined statue is still standing in the desert?

Its legs stand alone, vast and without a body, while the shattered face lies half sunk nearby beside a pedestal that still boasts of the king's works.

William Blake wrote and illustrated an epic poem between 1804 and 1810 named after which earlier English poet?

John Milton is the poem's central figure: he returns from Heaven and unites with Blake himself to explore how living writers relate to their predecessors.

William Blake was still working on a series of watercolours on the day he died, illustrating which poet?

Dante's Divine Comedy was the commission, and Blake is said to have spent one of the last shillings he possessed on a pencil so that he could keep sketching.

Which unfinished Coleridge poem follows a young woman who meets the mysterious Geraldine in the woods at night?

Christabel was planned in five parts, but Coleridge completed only two, and his inability to finish it left him doubting his own poetical power.

John Keats received a licence in 1816 to practise which profession, which he abandoned that year for poetry?

Apothecary was the licence Keats earned after an apprenticeship and hospital training, but before the end of the year he told his guardian he had resolved to be a poet.

Which John Keats poem of 1819 was composed after an evening walk along the River Itchen near Winchester?

To Autumn is the final work in the group known as Keats's 1819 odes, and he composed it on 19 September after one of his walks outside the city.

A John Keats poem draws on the folk belief that girls dream of their future husbands on the eve of which saint?

St. Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, and her eve falls on 20 January. The rites a girl had to perform included going to bed without any supper.

In John Keats's poem 'Lamia', the god Hermes finds the title character trapped in the form of which creature?

A serpent is her shape until Hermes restores her human form. Her true identity is later revealed by a sage at her own marriage feast, and her young lover dies of grief.

Which girl's name is given to the series of five poems William Wordsworth composed between 1798 and 1801?

Lucy's identity was never revealed by Wordsworth, who began the poems during a winter in Germany, and the question has generated intense speculation among literary historians.

In William Wordsworth's poem 'Michael', what is the trade of the ageing title character, father of Luke?

A shepherd, Michael watches his idyllic way of life disappear, and the poem has been read as a statement on enclosure and the modernization of England.

Which village was home to William Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, where he wrote much of his best-remembered poetry?

Grasmere's Dove Cottage housed Wordsworth from December 1799 to May 1808, more than eight years that were summed up as plain living but high thinking.

Lord Byron spoke in Parliament against a death penalty for which group of Nottinghamshire protesters?

The Luddites were 'frame breakers' who destroyed the textile machines that were putting them out of work, and in 1816 Byron wrote a 'Song' for them.

Which concept, set against the beautiful in Edmund Burke's 1757 treatise, became central to Romantic poetry?

The sublime is usually associated with grandeur, though it can also cover anything extraordinary that takes us beyond ourselves; Burke held it to be the antithesis of beauty.

Which 1817 prose work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge sets out his theory of the imagination across two volumes?

Biographia Literaria is long and loosely structured rather than a straightforward life story, and in it Coleridge works out the Kantian view of imagination as a shaping power.

William Wordsworth fell in love as a young man with which Frenchwoman, who gave birth to their daughter?

Annette Vallon was the daughter of a royalist. Money problems and tension between Britain and France forced Wordsworth home alone, though he supported mother and child in later life.

Which salaried government post for Westmorland did William Wordsworth accept in 1813, making him financially secure?

Distributor of Stamps brought Wordsworth a stipend of £400 a year, though the security was held to have come at the cost of his political freedom.

Under the false name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, Samuel Taylor Coleridge enlisted in 1793 in which army unit?

The Light Dragoons kept Coleridge only a few months before his brothers arranged his discharge, officially on the grounds of 'insanity', and he went back to college.

Blackwood's Magazine coined which mocking label in 1817 for a circle of poets and essayists that included John Keats?

The Cockney School was accused of 'low diction', rhymes said to suggest working-class speech, though of the writers it targeted only Keats could properly be regarded as a cockney.

Which poet and editor of The Examiner was jailed for two years for libelling the Prince Regent?

Leigh Hunt's newspaper had attacked the prince and described his physique as corpulent, and the government tried the Hunt brothers and sentenced them to two years in prison.

Which Northamptonshire 'Peasant Poet' walked some 80 miles home in 1841 after absconding from an asylum in Essex?

John Clare made the walk believing he was going to meet his first love, Mary Joyce, to whom he was convinced he was married. By the end of the year he had been committed again.

Which teenage poet, who passed off his verse as a 15th-century writer's and died at 17, influenced the Romantics?

Thomas Chatterton invented a medieval author named Thomas Rowley and was publishing work by the age of 11. Unable to live on his earnings in London, he poisoned himself.

In William Blake's private mythology, which bearded old man embodies conventional reason and law?

Urizen is sometimes shown with an architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe, or with nets in which he ensnares people in webs of law.

Which poet wrote 'Casabianca', about a boy who stays at his post on a burning ship in the Battle of the Nile?

Felicia Hemans based the 1826 poem on a true story: the boy was obedient enough to wait for his father's orders, not knowing that his father was no longer alive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent his fruitful years of 1797 and 1798 in a cottage at Nether Stowey in which county?

Somerset was where Coleridge wrote 'Frost at Midnight', and the house he lived in at Nether Stowey is now known as Coleridge Cottage.