PULP RANKED: The Top 5 Daddies of Romantic Poetry

By Madeline Ward

Ah, the 19th century softboy. Read on at your own peril.

5. Robert Burns

“O my Luve is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Luve is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.”

Red, Red Rose, 1794

I’ll admit that including Robert Burns as a romantic poet is cheating: Burn’s work technically pre-dates Romanticism, though his influence on the movement and the romantic tendencies of his work have led many scholars to label him as a pre or proto romantic figure. His works have also had a profound influence on the development of socialism and other radical political movements. He was also, despite the unfortunate sideburns, a bit of a looker.

4. Lord Byron

“She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.”

She Walks In Beauty, 1813

Yeah, Lord Byron was hot and his verse is sexy but he was also terrible to women. He had an affair with his sister, and his ex-lover Caroline Lamb once described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Alexander Larman published a study of the women in Byron’s life in 2016, which is sombre reading for anyone interested in historical misogynists.

3. Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The fountains mingle with the river

And the rivers with the ocean,

The winds of heaven mix for ever

With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

All things by a law divine

In one spirit meet and mingle.

Why not I with thine?— “

Love’s Philosophy, 1819

Percy Shelley flirted with the radical ideas, and the daughter, of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, marrying Mary Godwin in 1816. Political radicalism was something that Shelley embraces throughout his lifetime, as were the early principles of free love, proving that softboys are a truly timeless phenomena.

2. Robert Southey

“He spake his honest heart; the earliest fruits

His toil produced, the sweetest flowers that deck’d

The sunny bank, he gather’d for the maid,

Nor she disdain’d the gift”

Joan of Arc, 1796

Southey started his career as a faithful supporter of the French Revolution, but sadly followed fellow romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge down the distinctly un-sexy path of conservatism, with his political thoughts acquiring a distinct Tory flavour in the first decade of the 19th century. Those of you that find Southey even mildly handsome are recommended not to read anything produced after 1808.

1. John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Bright Star, 1819

Keats is surely the most romantic figure of the Romantic Movement, dying young in Rome and leaving behind an extensive catalogue of romantic, sensual verse. Aside from the series of Odes for which he is most remembered, he was also a very skilled writer of letters, and his declarations of love to Fanny Brawne, published after her death, are amongst the most published and well-read. I’ve included Bright Star in full because it’s just so dreamy.