Emily Dickinson is my favorite poet, and although themes of Romanticism run through some of her poems, I am excluding her works from this list in the name of variety.
While all of these are well-known poems, this isn’t a list of the most popular poems of the era; it is a list of my favorites. There are beloved poems written by literary giants that just aren’t my “cup of tea.”
With no further ado (if the above can be considered ado), here they are:
A Dream Within a Dream(Edgar Allan Poe) Rhyme Scheme: AAABBCCDDBB/EEFFGGGHHIIBB I love how Poe creates his own rhyme scheme. I wonder about the significance of switching from certainty after the first stanza (“All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream”) to uncertainty at the end (“Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?”).
A Poison Tree(William Blake) Rhyme Scheme: AABB What I admire about Blake is his creativity in writing about nature in novel ways (Tyger, Rose, Lamb, Tree, Garden, etc.). TL;DR: Don’t bottle up your anger.
Endymion, Book I (‘A thing of beauty…’)(John Keats) Rhyme Scheme: AABBCCDD… I always mentally linger, plumbing the depths of the first line, and never manage to process the rest of the poem. For beauty to…
