Among his peers, he was the most flamboyant and had gained quite a reputation for his wild lifestyle and scandalous love life. George Gordan Byron, better known as Lord Byron, was a key poet in the Romantic movement. Lord Byron (1788–1824) Lord Byron by Richard Westall (1813) Here are five Romantic poets to read for Valentine’s Day! There’s no denying that the Romantics were unapologetically a sentimental lot, but that’s what makes their poetry so beautiful, passionate, and even sensual. The German poet who first coined the term romantic, Friedrich Schlegel, succinctly defines Romanticism as “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form.” And indeed one of the major themes in Romantic poetry is the relationship between humans and their emotions and the creative impulse they elicit. They valued emotion as a source of inspiration and aesthetic experience, seeing it as more powerful than rational thought for the expression and explanation of the world around them. But as it pertains to literature, it can be defined by the poetry of these Romantic poets whose writings emphasize individualism, spontaneity, and subjectivity as well as express a reverence for nature, devotion to beauty, a belief that imagination is superior to reason, and a fascination with the past and its myths and mysticism. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake are some of the more prominent poets who helped define and in many respects were influenced by Romanticism, which has a rather broad definition.
So who are these Romantic poets, and what makes them so “romantic,” anyway? They were poets who were very much influenced by the Romantic movement, which greatly influenced art and literature in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. The Romantics didn’t necessarily write about love per se and many of their poems might not even be the perfect love poem in that they don’t follow the conventions of traditional love poetry, but in many respects their poetry certainly speaks the language of love. Isn’t a Shakespearean sonnet romantic enough, you ask? Well, by “Romantic,” with a capital R, I mean something more sublime in how it expresses love and excites our emotions in such a manner that transcends ordinary experience, or how it conflates the grandeur of nature and the awe it inspires with the ineffable feeling of being in love. You can’t go wrong with any of them, but if you want to try something that isn’t too run-of-the-mill, why not try some of the Romantic poets.
But their poems are so widely used that the very act of reading them to your love seems a tad sappy, trite, and even cliché. There is of course the go-to poets whose names have long been associated with romance, such as William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Pablo Neruda, to name a few. If you’re not much of a wordsmith or perhaps too embarrassed to pen your lovey-dovey thoughts, there is a plethora of love poems out there that one can use, from poets of antiquity ( Sappho) to those living today ( Joy Harjo). Poetry has always been associated with love and courtship, and nothing is more romantic than sharing a poem with that special someone on the most romantic of days, which is only a few days away and is none other than Valentine’s Day.
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