Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how of all the English poets that comprise the Romantic period, Lord Byron (1788-1824), John Keats (1795-1821) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stand as the quintessential masters of Romantic poetry. It examines how their contributions to the aesthetics of versification are highly representative of the Romantic period by reviewing Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," Keats' major odes ("Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to Melancholy") and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

From the Paper:

"The great symbolic voice of the true Romantic poet can best be heard in John Keats' romantic odes. In "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats relates that his "heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk" (1st stanza, lines 1-2), which shows that Keats longs for happiness and wishes to be free like the nightingale, a symbol of great importance to the Romantic poets, for it represents freedom of expression and flights of fancy into the sublime. Thus, this image conjures up the idea that the poet has drunk poison (hemlock) which illustrates his deep longings for a spirit free of pain and misery, a reflection of the often poverty-stricken lives led by a good number of Romantic poets."

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