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British Literature: The Poets (Byron, Keats, Shelley)

A guide for ENG 240 Foundations of British Literature.

George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

George Gordon Byron, commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among 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. ~ from Wikipedia

John Keats (1795-1821)

Keats an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death. Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets.

he poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes, such as "Ode to a Nightingale" , one of his 1819 odes,  first published in Annals of the Fine Arts.  Also noteworthy is the ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci (French: "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy)." The poem is considered an English classic, stereotypical to other poems of Keats. It avoids simplicity of interpretation despite simplicity of structure. At only a short twelve stanzas, of only four lines each, with a simple ABCB rhyme scheme, the poem is nonetheless full of enigmas, and has been the subject of numerous interpretations. ~ from Wikipedia

In the Cattell Library

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron.

He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as "Ozymandias", Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. ~ from Wikipedia