Greatest of the Romantic poets?

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

Poll question: Greatest of the Romantic poets?

Come on, how many poetry lovers do we have here? Am I the only one?

[Petrichor]

1. Why even bother?

It's not even close:

Shelley was a wuss
Keats was a wuss
Coleridge a druggie
Wordsworth boring
Blake out of his mind

[ThatPoetGuy]

7. Hmmmm....

Only four posts, doesn't like poetry --

must be a Freeper. x(

Welcome to DU!

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

20. First of all, practically all of them were druggies.

You call them wusses, based on what? Wordsworth was boring? Based on what?

[Wolfman 11]

2. Love

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

[Petrichor]

3. Still rings true today

Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

[gottaB]

4. When I have fears that I may cease to be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

[qwertyMike]

9. Ahhhhhhhhhh

[Fovea]

5. Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Perhaps better classified as an Aestheticist Poet, but certainly of the rough era... Atlanta in Calydon is worth the read.

Arthur Hugh Clough is another Victorian I love...
The latest Decalogue is a wonderfully relevant poem for these days.

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem487.html


Check it out.

[lazarus]

6. Blake wasn't really a Romantic

He was more a mystic.

I can't decide, to be honest. Never been a big Shelley or Keats fan. I tend towards Coleridge, but Wordsworth is nice. Byron I've grown to appreciate more as I've grown older. Depends on my mood, really.

Tennyson is my favourite poet.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

21. Tennyson is my all-time favorite as well,

and his Ulysses is a true masterpiece. The Romantics had just happened to be on my mind, hence the poll.

Some of my favorite Tennyson verses:


"That a lie, which is half a truth, is ever the blackest of lies.
That a lie which is all a lie, may be met and fought outright,
But a lie which is part a truth, is a harder matter to fight."


-The Grandmother


"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
and God fulfills Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."


-Idylls of the King



"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they."


-In Memoriam

[ThatPoetGuy]

8. Keats...

found sublimities in the English language that surpassed Shakespeare. The Odes and Hyperion, their language is inebriating, they are touched by sky; and they have a depth to them that none of the other Romantics share.

By this I mean:

Shelley's autumnal celebration ends "O Wind/When winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

Shelley's world is of such unnuanced symbolism that the only good thing about winter is that it will eventually become spring.

Compare that with Keats' sheer exuberance and celebration of the fallow season, in "To Autumn." Not to mention the gorgeousness of the poem! Speak it out loud, it's like having a mouthgasm.




To Autumn
by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.






.

[LWolf]

14. I have loved this poem since my senior year in high school.

It was on a page at the back of my English Lit text book. We never studied it, but it resonated so strongly that I "forgot" to return the whole damned textbook. 28 years later, it is still one of my favorite poems, reread again and again. Tomorrow being the Autumn Equinox, I'll celebrate by reading it aloud when I greet the sun.

I've always wanted a poster sized version, with an illustration behind it, to hang on my wall.

[gottaB]

23. Keats embeds the bilabials in sibilants

sublime, yes.

the vowel movement is more expressive, too. Take the last line:

æ æ ɚ I ŋ w a o w I ɚ I n ɘ aI

The voice edges up, swallows itself, edges up, and then rises. The climax seems inevitable.

And metrically--. It's just outstanding.

[qwertyMike]

10. Shakespeare

Sonnets

Then that young 'un Keats

Yeats

Sorry to be boring

[sir_captain]

11. I'll take Catullus

the Roman poet, and the world's 2nd romanticist after Sappho...

[LeftishBrit]

12. Wordsworth, at his best

His worst poems are plain bad; but the best are great!

I'm also a great Tennyson fan. Unfortunately, he seems to be best known for "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which is not his greatest by any means. I love "In Memoriam". Arthur Hugh Clough is another 19th century poet I love. I also like Matthew Arnold. John Clare wrote some wonderful poems.

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

22. My main problem with Wordsworth is not the quality of his poetry,

but the consistency. He writes most his poetry between 1798 and 1805, and after that he basically sits on his ass, soaking up the celebrity, with the only real poetry done being edits to his Prelude. Byron viciously satirizes him and the rest of the Lake Poets )Coleridge, Southey, etc).

[no_hypocrisy]

13. Goethe fan checking in

THE HEATHROSE (Roslein)

ONCE a boy a Rosebud spied,

Heathrose fair and tender,
All array'd in youthful pride,--
Quickly to the spot he hied,

Ravished by her splendour.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,

Heathrose fair and tender!

Said the boy, "I'll now pick thee,

Heathrose fair and tender!"
Said the rosebud, "I'll prick thee,
So that thou'lt remember me,

Ne'er will I surrender!"
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,

Heathrose fair and tender!

Now the cruel boy must pick

Heathrose fair and tender;
Rosebud did her best to prick,--
Vain 'twas 'gainst her fate to kick--

She must needs surrender.
Rosebud, rosebud, rosebud red,

Heathrose fair and tender!

[happyasaclam]

25. I love Goethe's poetry

I think I still have a couple of volumes of his works around somewhere.

[gottaB]

26. my favorite poem from Goethe: Wandrers Nachtlied

Wandrers Nachtlied

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Wanderer's Serenade

Over all the peaks
there is quiet,
In all the treetops
you percieve
barely a breath;
The little birds fall silent in the woods.
Just wait, soon
you'll be quiet too.

Maybe somebody can give a better translation. Anyway, many more Goethe poems in the original are online here:

http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/autoren/goethe.htm

[Lavender Brown]

15. My thesis was on Wordsworth

But I have to say I prefer Coleridge.

[GOPisEvil]

19. You are a woman of great taste!

See the quote in my sig. line. That's Sam. :D

[Aristus]

16. Byron

So We'll Go No More A-roving


So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night
Though the heart was made for loving
And the moon be still as bright

For the sword outwears the sheath
And the soul outwears the breast
And the heart must pause to breathe
And love itself have rest

Though the night was made for loving
And the day returns too soon
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon


WOW!

[Chovexani]

24. I'm a total sucker for Byron

Nothing moves me quite like his work. It's hard to explain.

[chiburb]

17. Rod McKuen....

Arms around me these past years have not been commonplace, your comfort passed to me from out there, somewhere - dare we call it outer space, has kept me safe. Your thought embraces better than the memory's triumph over time. I have longed for you, thought up songs for you, missed and mourned you as the times passed past. Here you are. Brought back to me by your wish mixed with mine. Noise cannot touch us here. I will try and make for you the calmest place there is within this loud and getting louder world.

No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land.

Rod McKuen, April, 1998

;-)

[pagerbear]

18. I LOVE DU POETRY THREADS!

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