In Britain, nineteenth-century poetry began with Romanticism and ended in Decadence, with the high Victorian poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Christina Rossetti coming in the middle. In the United States, meanwhile, Longfellow, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson helped to shape the course of nineteenth-century American poetry. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest and most representative poems of the nineteenth century written in English, whether in Britain or America. Percy Shelley, ‘ To a Skylark ’. Shelley completed this, one of his most famous poems, in June 1820. The inspiration for the poem was an evening walk Shelley took with his wife, Mary, in Livorno, in north-west Italy. Mary later described the circumstances that gave rise to the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark.’ The opening line of the poem gave Noel Coward the title for his pl...
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