A group of late 19th-century French writers, including Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, who favored dreams, visions, and the associative powers of the imagination in their poetry. They rejected their predecessors’ tendency toward naturalism and realism, believing that the purpose of art was not to represent reality but to access greater truths by the “systematic derangement of the senses,” as Rimbaud described it. The translated works of Edgar Allan Poe influenced the French Symbolists.
1781-1900
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- Glossary Terms
A poetic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that turned toward nature and the interior world of feeling, in opposition to the mannered formalism and disciplined scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment era that preceded it. English poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and Lord Byron produced work that expressed spontaneous feelings, found parallels to their own emotional lives in the natural world, and celebrated creativity rather than logic. Browse more Romantic poets.
- Glossary Terms
Poetry written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) may be referred to as Victorian poetry. Following Romanticism, Victorian poets continued many of the previous era’s main themes, such as religious skepticism and valorization of the artist as genius; but Victorian poets also developed a distinct sensibility. The writers of this period are known for their interest in verbal embellishment, mystical interrogation, brooding skepticism, and whimsical nonsense. The most prolific and well-regarded poets of the age included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde. Browse more Victorian poets.
- AuthorJames Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic, Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge.
- AuthorPoet and editor William Cullen Bryant stood among the most celebrated figures in the frieze of 19th-century America. The fame he won as a poet while in his youth remained with him as he entered his 80s; only...
- AuthorBorn in Edinburgh, Scotland, influential novelist, poet, and historian, and biographer Sir Walter Scott studied law as an apprentice to his father before his writing career flourished. At age 25, he published...
- AuthorWriter, doctor, and educator Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, earned a BA at Harvard University in 1829 and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1836. He was part of a group of ...
- AuthorCharles Baudelaire is one of the most compelling poets of the 19th century. While Baudelaire’s contemporary Victor Hugo is generally—and sometimes regretfully—acknowledged as the greatest of 19th-century French...
- AuthorThomas Carlyle was an extremely long-lived Victorian author. He was also highly controversial, variously regarded as sage and impious, a moral leader, a moral desperado, a radical, a conservative, a Christian...
- AuthorOne of the most famous Victorian women writers, and a prolific poet, Charlotte Brontë is best known for her novels, including Jane Eyre (1847), her most popular. Like her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning...
- AuthorBritish writer Mary Coleridge was well known in her day as a novelist and essayist; now, she is better known for her poetry. The great-grandniece of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the daughter of...
- AuthorThomas Moore was closely attuned to the taste and artistic sensibility of his age, but he is remembered now primarily by the Irish, who still sing his songs and claim him as their own. He was a born lyricist...
- AuthorRobert Louis Stevenson is best known as the author of the children’s classic Treasure Island (1882), and the adult horror story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Both of these novels have...
- AuthorGérard de Nerval is the pen name of French Romantic poet and author Gérard Labrunie, who was born in Paris. He was the son of an army doctor and was raised by his great-uncle in the Mortefontaine countryside...
- AuthorHeinrich Heine was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, to assimilated Jewish parents. Heine’s uncle was a powerful banker who supported Heine for much of his life, only to write him out of his will. Heine attended...
- AuthorRomantic poet Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born in Moscow, Russia and was raised in the Penzenskaya province by his wealthy maternal grandmother. His mother, an aristocrat, died when he was three years ...
- AuthorWilliam Miller was born in Glasgow, Scotland. Trained as a cabinetmaker, he began writing poetry as a young man. Miller placed many of his poems, written in Scots, in local newspapers and journals. Known as...
- AuthorUnlike most of the English Romantics, who wrote predominantly either in verse or in prose, Robert Southey—like his friend and brother-in-law Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, to some extent, Sir Walter Scott—was...
- AuthorThomas Love Peacock was an accomplished poet, essayist, opera critic, and satiric novelist. During his lifetime his works received the approbation of other writers (some of whom were Peacock’s friends and ...
- AuthorIrish nationalist writer Katharine Tynan was born in Clondalkin, a suburb of Dublin, in 1859. She was educated at the Dominican Convent of St. Catherine and started writing at a young age. Though Catholic,...