50 Fun Facts About Romantic Poets

Who wrote the long poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?

Childe Harold made him a celebrity overnight; Don Juan was still unfinished when he died in 1824.

Shelley's second wife, Mary, wrote which novel?

She began it during the rain-soaked summer of 1816 at Byron's villa on Lake Geneva.

Which bird does the Ancient Mariner shoot?

The crew hang the dead bird around his neck, which is where the expression comes from.

Who wrote the sonnet 'Ozymandias'?

It appeared in The Examiner in January 1818, under a pen name.

Who wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?

Both belong to the run of great odes he wrote in the spring of 1819, two years before his death.

Who wrote 'The Tyger' and Songs of Innocence?

He printed and hand-coloured the books himself with his wife Catherine, and sold very few in his lifetime.

Wordsworth is associated with which English region?

He, Coleridge and Robert Southey became known as the Lake Poets.

Which 1798 collection is generally said to have begun English Romanticism?

Its 1800 preface, arguing for poetry in 'the real language of men', is often called the manifesto of Romanticism.

Which poet co-wrote the 1798 collection with Coleridge that launched the movement?

He wrote 19 of the 23 poems in the first edition, though Coleridge's four made up a third of the length.

Who wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?

It is his longest major poem and opened the first edition of Lyrical Ballads.

Keats died at 25 of which disease?

His mother and his brother Tom had died of the same disease, and he had nursed Tom himself.

How did Shelley die in 1822?

His boat, the Don Juan, went down in a storm off the Italian coast; his body was cremated on the beach.

Coleridge struggled for most of his life with addiction to which drug?

He was first given laudanum for childhood illness, and later claimed 'Kubla Khan' came to him in an opium dream.

Byron died in 1824 while fighting in which conflict?

He died of a fever at Missolonghi aged 36, and Greeks still treat him as a national hero.

Keats died in which city in 1821?

He had gone to Italy for the climate; his house by the Spanish Steps is now the Keats–Shelley Memorial House.

Romantic poetry was a reaction against which earlier style?

Out went the age of epics, odes and satires governed by rule; in came emotion, imagination and nature.

Wordsworth defined poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful' what?

The line is from his 1800 Preface, which adds that it 'takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility'.

Which pioneer of computing was Byron's daughter?

She was born in December 1815, weeks before her parents' marriage collapsed, and is buried beside him.

Byron said 'I awoke one morning and found myself' what?

The morning after the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage appeared in 1812.

What was the name of Wordsworth's sister, the diarist?

They lived together at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and her journals record the walk that produced his daffodils.

Besides poetry, Blake worked professionally in which trade?

He started by engraving copies of Greek antiquities as a boy and later invented his own relief-etching method.

Byron attended which university?

Shelley, by contrast, went to Oxford and was thrown out within a year.

What is generally considered Wordsworth's magnum opus?

It was only published, and titled, by his wife after his death in 1850; before that it was 'The Poem to Coleridge'.

To whom does the Ancient Mariner tell his tale?

The listener goes from impatience to fear to fascination, held by the old sailor's glittering eye.

Who was Keats's fiancée, to whom he wrote his best-known letters?

He left for Rome in 1820 knowing he would probably never see her again.

Byron's Villa Diodati, scene of the 1816 ghost-story contest, overlooked which water?

Kept indoors by incessant rain, the party read German ghost stories and set out to write their own.

Byron was born with what physical condition?

He compensated with violent bouts of exercise, boxing and swimming, including the Hellespont.

Which Blake poem became the words of the hymn 'Jerusalem'?

It comes from the preface to his epic Milton; Hubert Parry set it to music in 1916.

Who called Byron 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'?

She was his lover; Annabella Milbanke became his wife, and that went badly too.

Which phrase about following a story did Coleridge coin?

He also helped introduce German idealist philosophy to England and influenced Emerson's transcendentalism.

Coleridge said the writing of 'Kubla Khan' was interrupted by whom?

He claimed he had 200–300 lines in his head from an opium dream and lost them; the fragment sat unpublished until 1816.

Ozymandias is the Greek name for which pharaoh?

Shelley was anticipating the arrival in London of a huge fragment of a Ramesses statue, the Younger Memnon.

Which term did Keats coin for being 'in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts'?

It appears in an 1817 letter to his brothers and has been argued over by critics ever since.

Keats's gravestone reads 'Here lies One whose Name was writ in' what?

He asked for no name or date on the stone, convinced he had left no immortal work behind.

Which pamphlet got Shelley expelled from Oxford in 1811?

He posted it to every bishop and head of college, refused to answer questions, and was out within months.

Wordsworth became Poet Laureate in 1843 on the death of which fellow Lake Poet?

He held the post until his own death from pleurisy in 1850.

What is the title of Shelley's elegy for Keats?

A year later Shelley's own ashes were buried near Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

Shelley wrote 'The Mask of Anarchy' in response to which 1819 event?

Its call to 'rise like lions after slumber' later made it a favourite of Chartists and radicals.

Which long Keats poem did Blackwood's dismiss as 'imperturbable drivelling idiocy'?

Keats dedicated it to Thomas Chatterton and called it 'a trial of my Powers of Imagination'.

Byron's Don Juan is written in which Italian verse form?

Eight lines rhyming ABABABCC, with the closing couplet used for a comic anticlimax.

What did Coleridge and Southey call their planned utopian commune in Pennsylvania?

The scheme collapsed, but Coleridge married Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's wife, in the process.

Which physician at Byron's Villa Diodati gathering wrote The Vampyre?

His story is the ancestor of the aristocratic vampire, seven decades before Dracula.

Shelley wrote 'Ozymandias' in friendly competition with which writer?

The banker-poet's sonnet on the same subject appeared a few weeks later and is almost entirely forgotten.

Under what pen name was 'Ozymandias' first published?

It means 'lover of dormice'; 'Dormouse' was his pet name for Mary.

What was the name of the boat in which Shelley drowned?

Named for Byron's poem; it was lost in a storm on the return voyage with an inexperienced crew of three.

How many cantos of Don Juan did Byron complete?

Some 16,000 lines; his publisher John Murray refused the later cantos as immoral.

Blake lived in London all his life except three years in which Sussex village?

A quarrel with a soldier there led to a sedition trial, which he won.

Byron's grandfather, an admiral, was nicknamed what by the press?

Vice Admiral John Byron survived a shipwreck as a midshipman and set a speed record for circumnavigating the globe.

Coleridge was born in which Devon town?

His father was the vicar and headmaster there; at eight he was sent to Christ's Hospital in London.

Who was Blake's wife, who printed and coloured his books alongside him?

She worked with him for nearly 45 years and was a printmaker in her own right.