1781-1900

A group of late 19th-century French writers who favored dreams, visions, and the associative powers of the imagination in their poetry.

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.

Poetry written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), including by poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

James Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic, Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge.

Poet 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…

Born 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…

Writer, 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 …

Charles 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…

Thomas 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…

One 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…

British 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…

Thomas 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…

Robert 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…

Gérard 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…

Heinrich 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…

Romantic 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 …

William 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…

Unlike 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…

Thomas 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 …

Irish 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,…