Feeling a bit “romantic” with Valentine’s Day nearing? This week the UK newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, are highlighting one Romantic poet a day. On The Guardian’s website, you can read an introduction to each poet, listen to audio of some of their seminal works and download podcasts of discussions. Here is a snippet from the intro to Coleridge by Richard Holmes:
So it’s easy to forget how strange, how captivating, how haunted Coleridge’s actual poems are. Why is it, for example, that so many of them are set at night? Why do their outer landscapes always dissolve into inner dream worlds? Why are they so full of guilt? And yet why are they also so often suffused with beautiful, healing, glimmering moonlight?
So far this week they have covered Byron, Keats, Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge, with Shelley and Blake to come in the next two days.