“The Romantic Poets and Their Circle” by Richard Holmes

For most of us, when we read the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Coleridge (“the Big 5”), we read their poetry in the high school or college classroom. We might get a paragraph or two of introduction to the times in which they lived and wrote, but we don’t usually get much beyond that. Unless a gifted teacher, determined to help the class understand, goes into great detail about the Romantic era.

As Richard Holmes reminds us in The Romantic Poets and Their Circle, Romantic poetry didn’t spring from nothing; it had a context, a very broad context, involving the other creative arts, politics, culture, society, war and revolution. What was happening in poetry was important because it both influenced and reflected what was happening in society at large, especially British society.

Holmes, professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy, has a deep background in the Romantic period. His works include Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), Footsteps (1996), Selected Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1996), Coleridge: Darker Reflections (1998), Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2001), and The Age of Wonder (2010). He’s also the author of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage (2011) and Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2014).

This particular work is a comparatively small volume of some 136 pages, written and assembled for Britain’s National Portrait Gallery in London. It features in introductory essay and some 30 short entries on the Romantic poets and the painters, editors, essayists, and writers who formed the literary culture of the period that covers approximately 1770 to 1830.

Richard Holmes

Consider what was happening during that period: the American and French revolutions; the rise and ultimate defeat of Napoleon; the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; the growing demands for universal male suffrage and the first stirrings of the idea that women might have rights, too; scientific breakthroughs; the War of 1812. And Holmes notes that something which arose then that we today find completely familiar was the Romantic notion of genius, or illumination from within, including a marked emphasis on individual feelings.

It was also an age of counterrevolution – Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the Bourbons, the Congress of Vienna that ushered in the “Age of Metternich,” the often brutal suppression of worker unrest in Britain. It is. Perhaps, another reason why the Romantic period seems so familiar to us today – it was an age of extremes in politics, society and even personal morality.

As short a volume as it is, The Romantic Poets and Their Circle is a succinct introduction to the people and the period whose influence continues today.

This month at Tweetspeak Poetry, I have a series on the poet John Keats and the Keats Walk I took while recently in London. Last week, I introduced the series with “Keats and a Walk into His Life.” Tomorrow, I look at the religion and politics that influenced his poetry.

Painting (top): Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,” oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner (1812). Tate Britain Museum, London.

Nicholas Roe’s “John Keats”

He was 25 when he died. In his lifetime, he published all of 54 poems, and wrote a total of 150. He was seen by many as something of a radical, abandoning the poetry written by John Dryden and Alexander Pope and instead loosening poetic forms, and thus inviting massive cultural and societal change (they took poetry rather seriously in the early 1800s). Upon his death, he slipped into a shallow obscurity, and it would take Alfred, Lord Tennyson to resurrect his poetry and his reputation.

Today, he’s seen as one of the “Big 5” of Romantic poetry – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron (aka George Gordon). And John Keats.

We usually meet Keats and his fellow Romantic poets in high school English classes, and we wonder why anyone would write a poem about a Greek pot. Or a nightingale. Love poems we understand, but this other stuff seems a little strange. It often takes a gifted teacher to help us understand what poems like “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are really about.

In September, my wife and I had the opportunity to join a “Keats Walk” in Hampstead and Hampstead Heath in north London, led by the able guide Anita Miller. Hampstead is the area most associated with Keats, the area where he lived for a time, and many of his greatest poems were written there. (Starting tomorrow, I have a series of four articles at Tweetspeak Poetry in November that explore the walk, the poetry, and the impact and influence of Keats). The walk ended at Keats House, almo known as Wentworth House, and it was there I bought the 2012 biography of Keats by Nicholas Roe, simply entitled John Keats.

A number of good biographies of Keats have been published, including ones by W. Jackson Bate, former British poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Sidney Colvin (an older biography free on Amazon Kindle under public domain), and the pre-Raphaelite writer William Rossetti (also free on Amazon Kindle). Nicholas Roe’s biography likely exceeds them all – meticulously researched, exploring both Keats’ life and his poetry, documenting what is and isn’t known about the poet, his family, and his poetry.

Roe, professor of English Literature at St. Andrews University in Scotland, brings a wealth of both professional, academic and perhaps even personal understanding to his subject. He’s the author of Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1990); John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1999); The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (2002); Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (2003); Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (2005); and Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005). He’s also served as editor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2002); Keats and History (2007); and English Romantic Writers and the West Country (2010).

Nicholas Roe

If his publications weren’t enough, Roe is also chair of The Keats Foundation, Keats House, Hampstead,  and a trustee of The Wordsworth Trust, The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, and The Wordsworth Conference Foundation. He’s one of the leading Romantic era scholars.

His biography of Keats is that of an academic, yes, but an academic who has broadened his writing style to embrace a more general interested reader. And the picture of Keats he presents is more of a complete one, that of a rising poet conscious of what it takes to succeed in poetry, dealing with family tragedies and illness for almost all of his young life, and a poet who could quickly dash off a beautiful poem while more experienced, practiced poets would agonize. Keats was also the poet somewhat sneered at by critics; he did not arise from the gentlemanly, educated classes but from a more middle-class commercial one (Keats, Roe points out, was often cited by contemporary critics as a “Cockney poet”).

Well-researched and extensively footnoted, Roe’s John Keats provides tremendous insight into the poet who almost fell into obscurity but whose poetry would influence Tennyson, the pre-Raphaelites, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Derek Waldcott and Seamus Heaney, and the poet who wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the English language. It’s an excellent biography.

To see the start of the series on Keats in Hampstead and the Keats Walk, please visit Tweetspeak Poetry tomorrow.

Painting: John Keats on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn.

“The Poet and the Vampyre”

With a title like The Poet and the Vampyre, you have to wonder what you’re getting into.

No, it’s not a new installment of the Twilight series. The full title of the Andrew McConnell Stott’s book provides a better idea: The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters.

Stott, a professor of English at State University of New York – Buffalo, is the author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (2010), the story of Britain’s greatest comedian, and Comedy: The New Critical Idiom (2005; second edition 2014). In The Poet and the Vampyre, he tells the story of George Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelly in the period from 1816 to 1820, and what happened one cold June night at a villa on Lake Geneva that gave birth to both the story of Frankenstein and the first published work about the vampire legend (written some 80 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula).

But this isn’t an account of fictional monsters. Instead, it’s the account of the lives of two Romantic poets, which often assumed a reality and shape more startling that anything in fiction. Even by today’s loose standards, the two poets led lives that often exceeded the scandalous.

The Poet and the Vampyre is a marvelous account, fascinating in its detail and outstanding in meticulous research turned into a highly readable story.

Shelley was already married when he met Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin, daughter of the London bookseller and radical thinker William Godwin. He promptly abandoned his wife; he and Mary became lovers and moved in together. They decide to travel to the continent, taking with them Mary’s sister Claire, who is in love with Lord Byron and determined to become his lover.

Lord Byron had just reached the pinnacle of fame and celebrity, attracting a horde of lovers ranging from Lady Caroline Lamb to chambermaids, when his relatively new wife accused him of nefarious misdeeds (likely false but also believable). Celebrity turned into notoriety, and Byron left England for the continent. He’s accompanied by his doctor, the young John Polidori, son on an Italian immigrant and who has his own literary ambitions.

Andrew McConnell Stott, hamming it up in front of Buckingham Palace

Shelley and his entourage meet up with Byron and his entourage in Switzerland. And one night, in a villa on Lake Geneva, with the weather unexpectedly gloomy and cold, Byron suggests they all write a ghost story. He and Shelley eventually abandon their efforts; Byron at this time is working on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and other poems, and Shelley on his own poetry.

But Mary Shelley (she and Percy do eventually marry after the death of his wife) begins a story that will become Frankenstein. And John Polidori begins to write a story about a vampire, which when published would first be falsely attributed to Byron (publishers could be rather unscrupulous at a time when copyright was at best a very fluid concept) (a notorious aristocratic poet would sell better than an unknown doctor).

The two poets eventually go somewhat separate ways, Shelley with a pregnant Claire in tow. Shelley returns to England, while Byron travels to Italy. Polidori is also dismissed by Byron and after some time in Italy returns to England.

A host of literary, political and military characters move easily across the pages: Napoleon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, John Keats, and a raft of British and European aristocrats. Stott uses a rather extensive archive of letters and documents related to the poets, and broadens the reader’s understanding with accounts of travel in the period and literary life in the first two decades of the 19^th century. He does this so well that the reader feels joined to the story, deeply experiencing the lives of the five main characters.

The Poet and the Vampyre is a story of ambition, radical social beliefs carried out to the fullest, and sometimes shocking behavior, framed by poetry and two works of fiction whose effects still reverberate today.

Top illustration: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.