The Romantics
Poets of the Romantic period, roughly 1790 to 1850, writing in England, Italy, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and America.
- You get the Ancient Mariner with his dead albatross and glittering eye up front, then Wordsworth talking about leech-gatherers and a stubborn little girl who insists her dead siblings still count. Quiet, plainspoken poems mostly, so read it slow, a few at a time.
- You get a man in his early twenties writing lines so lush you can almost taste them, autumn's cider oozing from the press, the nightingale fading over dark fields. Read the odes slowly, out loud if you can; Keats rewards lingering, not skimming.
- You get a brilliantly cheeky poem in ottava rima, where Juan’s travels keep exposing the hypocrisy of polite society while Byron’s narrator wanders into jokes, politics, and sudden tenderness. It takes patience with the digressions, but the voice feels startlingly alive and conversational.
- Leopardi scrive di desiderio, noia e indifferenza della natura in un italiano molto musicale. Comincia da L'infinito, quindici versi in cui una siepe su un colle gli chiude la vista e la sua mente corre via oltre.
- You get a witty, melancholy verse novel where Onegin’s cool detachment keeps colliding with Tatyana’s earnestness, while Pushkin’s narrator chats about everything from duels to country life. The story is compact, playful, and quietly painful, though its social wit rewards a little patience if poetry in translation isn’t your usual thing.
- You get a remarkably candid record of love taking shape, from guarded doubt to the famous “How do I love thee?” and its steady, almost prayerful answer. The language is ornate and intensely Victorian, but the fear of being unworthy and the relief of being chosen still feel startlingly close.
- Poe's poems are best read aloud at night, when the hypnotic drumbeat of The Raven and the sad chime of Annabel Lee can really work on you. It's a small body of work, moody and musical, and if gothic melancholy isn't your thing, skip it.
- Half of it is just people arguing over hunting dogs, picking mushrooms, and stirring bigos while Napoleon looms offstage, and that's the point: Mickiewicz is memorializing a vanished world he loved. Read it slow, in a good verse translation, when you want homesickness for a place you've never been.
- You'll want a quiet evening for these, they're steeped in grief for serfs and vanished Cossack freedom, but Shevchenko sings it, all Dnipro riverbanks and stolen daughters like poor Kateryna. Slow, mournful, and somehow steadying, especially the Testament.