Young Poets in Love

Young Romantics

Photo Credit: Corbis

The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s
Greatest Generation
by Daisy Hay
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pp., $27.50

All of us, at some time in our lives, have wanted to be part of a brilliant circle, a club of vivacious and talented people whose conversation is electric, whose parties are unforgettable, whose visionary schemes conjure new possibilities for living. To be part of such a coterie is to rise to the challenge of producing one’s best ideas, to look through a telescope and share the excitement of viewing a new land—The Future—that will, whether in its main thoroughfares or on its wilder margins, bear one’s own name. Of course, like fairy rings, such circles never last. Their members quarrel, or marry. Subunits form and disperse. People age and suffer: Their waistlines expand and their optimism contracts. The sparkling circle becomes a ring of memory, something lost whose magic lies in its irrecoverable energy.

The group that formed around the Romantic writers Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Lord Byron is the epitome of all brilliant circles, a ring—or rather a series of interconnected rings—that has continued to exert such a powerful hold over our collective imagination that it seems we will always be trying to recapture it. Here, Daisy Hay retells the story of how these authors met, inspired, and infuriated one another, loved, lost, and labored to create not only works of genius but also a new kind of society—an experiment that began with their own lifestyles but extended to a radically imagined, less rule-bound, more democratic and uncensored state, the kind of state that Britain in the early 19th century, governed by a bloated and weak regent, and tyrannized by a repressive and corrupt legislature, emphatically was not.