Romantic
The 'I' arrives. Poets stop performing public virtue and start describing their own minds, in ordinary language, in front of a landscape. It is also the period when the novel becomes a serious form — and when a teenager invents science fiction.
✦The lyric self at the centre of the poem
✦Nature as a presence, not a backdrop
✦The sublime — beauty that frightens
✦Ordinary diction instead of poetic ornament
William Blake
He fused poetry and visual art, and made the city a subject of prophetic anger.
William Wordsworth
He redefined the poem as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity', which is still how most people read.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He gave English poetry its taste for the strange, and criticism its idea of the imagination.
Lord Byron
He made the poet a public figure, and the hero a man with a past.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The most politically radical of the Romantics, and the most lyric.
John Keats
He made sensuousness philosophical: the poem that feels most also thinks hardest.
Mary Shelley
She invented science fiction, and made the ethics of creation a literary subject.
Jane Austen
She made the marriage plot carry moral and social argument, and free indirect style do the work of a narrator.
Edgar Allan Poe
He invented the detective story and the modern short story of effect, and made grief a formal problem.
Robert Burns
He kept a whole vernacular tradition alive, and gave it a lyric voice.
Edgar Allan Poe
He designed terror as an engineering problem: every effect calculated from the first sentence.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
He made shame the founding American subject.
Washington Irving
He invented the American small town as a place where stories do damage.
Ann Radcliffe
She invented the explained supernatural and made suspense respectable.
Matthew Lewis
He took the gothic to its extremes and made transgression the subject, not the side effect.
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818
A broken statue, a desert, and the longest-lasting boast in English.
The Tyger
William Blake · 1794
Six burning questions about who could possibly build something so fierce.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth · 1807
Ten thousand daffodils, and the memory that keeps on paying out.
Pride and Prejudice — Opening
Jane Austen · 1813
One ironic sentence that dismantles an entire marriage market.
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1816
A poem Coleridge claimed he dreamed, and then lost.
She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron · 1815
The most carefully balanced compliment ever paid in English verse.
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats · 1819
Keats tries to leave his own body, and nearly manages it.
Frankenstein — The Creature Speaks
Mary Shelley · 1818
A novel about creation, written by a teenager on a wet holiday.
London
William Blake · 1794
A city where every institution is a lock, and every face is a record of it.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth · 1802
London at dawn, seen as though nobody had ever looked at it before.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
William Wordsworth · 1798
Returning to a place to find that the person who first saw it has gone.
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
A poet asking the weather to use him as an instrument.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats · 1819
A ballad with one question, one answer, and no cure.
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns · 1794
The simplest promise in English poetry, and the longest one.
Emma
Jane Austen · 1815
A clever woman with nothing to do decides to arrange other people's lives.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen · 1811
Two sisters: one feels everything, one shows nothing, both must survive on very little.
Persuasion
Jane Austen · 1817
The second chance, eight years late.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe · 1839
A house, a brother, a sister, and a crack down the middle of everything.
The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe · 1843
A murderer explains, calmly, why he is not mad.
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe · 1842
A prince locks the plague out and holds a party in colour-coded rooms.
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe · 1846
A man takes his enemy down to the cellar to taste a wine that does not exist.
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe · 1843
A man who loves animals becomes the thing he most fears.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving · 1820
A schoolmaster, a rival, a horse race, and one very effective rumour.
Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1835
A man walks into the woods and sees everyone he trusts.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe · 1794
A castle, a heroine, and a great deal of unexplained terror.
The Monk
Matthew Lewis · 1796
A saintly monk, a sorcerer, a nun, and a descent with no brakes.