This volume contains a fine selection of some of the best verse, accompanied by evocative illustrations, of four of the great Romantic poets: Byron, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. Their writing had a profound influence on English literature - they saw and felt things brilliantly afresh; they rejoiced in a mystical oneness with nature and in individual self-expression; and nostalgia for childhood, unrequited love and the exiled hero were constant themes. Wordsworth led the first generation of Romantic writers with his belief that poetry is the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. The second generation - Byron, Shelley and Keats - absorbed their predecessors' tumultuous influences, wrote swiftly, travelled extensively and died tragically young. This selection of their verse is accompanied mainly by British paintings of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The aim is not to illustrate the poems, but rather through the paintings to convey the mood of the writing.
Author
George Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond. Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.
