William Blake (1757-1827) was apprenticed to an engraver, engraved and published Songs of Innocence (1789) and the darker Songs of Experience (1794). His major prose work is the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), also printed with engravings. Many strange prophetic works, preaching rebellion against tyrants and oppressive codes. Self taught and with no contemporary followers of note, but grouped with the Romantics if he belongs anywhere.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) had a mother who died when he was 8 and a father who died when he was 13; fixated on his sister Dorothy, who never married. On his second visit to the French Revolution, he joined the moderates and father a daughter on Annette Vallon, deserting both to return to England in 1792. His friend Coleridge (met in 1795) helped him get over his remorse, and a legacy that same year gave him enough to live on. In 1798 he and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which included his "Tintern Abbey" and STC's "Ancient Mariner." This is the real beginning of English Romanticism (Blake is so thoroughly idiosyncratic) and of the subjective style that still dominates modern lyrics. Married happily in 1802. Quarrelled with Coleridge in 1810. Poet laureate in 1843, inspiration having long since left him.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a vicar's son educated at Cambridge. A friend of Southey--they married two sisters and shared an early devotion to "Pantisocracy"--a kind of utopian communitarianism. Later conservative in politics, popularized German thought in England. Wrote his best poems in his early friendship with Wordsworth. His marriage was lousy, and he nursed a hopeless love for Wordsworth's sister in law.
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) was sent down for Oxford, an early sign of the quarrelsome temper which also wrecked his marriage. Lived much of his life in Italy, and died in Florence. "Rose Aylmer" was a daughter of Lord Aylmer's, loved by Landor, but sent to an aunt in India when her mother remarried--died there at 20.
Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was a song-writer revered in his native Ireland. A friend of Byron's who left him his memoirs, which Moore destroyed.
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a radical editor and man of letters whose comments on the Prince Regent landed him in jail, where he continued to edit his paper and was visited by Byron, Moore, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and the essayist Charles Lamb.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), son of an improvident and rakish father, who died whnen Byron was 3, was early seduced by his governess, who may have helped generate his sado-masochistic tendencies. Went to Harrow and Cambridge. Early lyrics published as Hours of Idleness (1807) and vigorously defended in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809). Reputation established by first two parts of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). Famous love affairs ensued, which he broke off to make a loveless marriage, which failed because of his bad temper, incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta, and irregular sexual tastes. Soon a social pariah, he fled to the continent in 1816, making good friends with Shelley. Wrote heroic dramas, and established a European reputation as a great lover, though he was--like his Don Juan, a passive and bisexual figure. Famous relationship with Countess Teresa Guiccioli, 1819-23. Went to fight for Greek liberty in 1823, though he was not keen on most contemporary Greeks (exception: his page-boy). Died there.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was kicked out of Oxford for co-authoring a tract on The Necessity of Atheism. Went to London, where he frequented radical circles, eloping at age 19 with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, by whom he had a daughter and whom he got pregnant again before he ran off with Mary Godwin, the 17 year old daughter of the radical author William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. [Mary Godwin Shelley later wrote Frankenstein, 1818.] Left England in May 1816 and met and made friends with George Gordon, Lord Byron, in Geneva. Returned to England in the fall. Harriet drowned herself, and he married Mary. The next year, though, he was refused custody of his two daughters by Harriet. He went into exile in 1818 and drowned in Italy. Some prominent poet-critics have found him a sloppy writer (Eliot, Auden), but he is loved by academics.
John Keats (1795-1821) was a short (5') but handsome medical student who got to know Shelley through the radical editor Leigh Hunt. Shelley helped him publish his Poems (1817), a failure. In 1818 he nursed his brother who was dying of TB, which had killed his mother when he was 8, and which was already after Keats; he also fell in love with Fanny Brawne. The Eve of St. Agnes (1818) is a long poem in Spenserian stanzas.
William Barnes (1801-1886) was a farmer's son who became a clergyman. Known for rural poems in Dorset dialect.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a rector's son who starred at Cambridge, though his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) got mixed reviews. Much distressed when his best friend A.H. Hallam died in 1833. In 1850 he published In Memoriam, became Poet Laureate, and married his long-time fiancée.
Robert Browning (1812-1889), son of a NonConformist bank clerk, studied mainly at home, financed by his father for many years. Much narrative and dramatic poetry--the great actor Macready actually convinced him to write a number of plays, which are worth looking at. Famous for the "dramatic monologue" form--the unreliable narrator invades the lyric. Secretly married Elizabeth Barrett (see her unjustly neglected Sonnets from the Portuguese) and ran off with her in 1846 to Florence, Italy, where they lived happily for 15 years despite her TB. His best-known narrative poem, The Ring and the Book (1869), was written after her death--an Italian crime story told through a series of dramatic monologues. An admirer of Keats and Shelley, Browning was considered a "difficult" poet in his time, and is stereotyped as having a rougher, more colloquial verse than Tennyson's. [Final caesuras, frequent enjambment, diction?]
Emily Bronte (1818-1848) was one of the Bronte sisters and the author of Wuthering Heights (1847). [Her sisters were Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre (1847), and Anne, author of Agnes Grey (1847). All the sisters wrote poetry, and Emily's is highly regarded.
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) is the subject of Arnold's elegy "Thyrsis." They'd been classmates at Rugby and Oxford. Clough resigned a fellowship at Oriel (Oxford) because of religious doubts. His doubts, his temperamental melancholy, and his moral earnestness are typically Victorian.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is sometimes ranked with (or just behind) Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning as a major Victorian, but his verse is far more derivative than theirs (or many others). Son of the Thomas Arnold, famous moralizing headmaster of Rugby School. At Oxford, his best friend was the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who is presumably the "shepherd" addressed in Arnold's "The Scholar Gypsy" (1853). Fell in love on the continent but married respectably at home. Another chesnut is "Dover Beach" (not published till 1867 but written earlier). Later influential as literary critic.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1892) was one of the founder's of the "Pre-Raphaelite" group of painters, along with William Holman Hunt and John Millais, and the term is sometimes applied to the poets of his circle--influenced Swinburne, perhaps more as a critic than in S's poetry. His wife, Elizabeth Siddal (m. 1860) had been his model and mistress for 10 years, but it was a bad marriage, and she killed herself in a couple of years. Clues to his tangled relationships with women appear to be scattered through his sonnet-sequence, The House of Life. He buried his manuscripts with Elizabeth and had to dig them back up so he publish his Poems (1870). Some critics love him, but he is widely dismissed as a minor poet.
George Meredith (1828-1909) briefly shared a house with Rossetti and Swinburne after the failure of his first marriage. This is portrayed in his lyric sequence (16-line iambic pentameter), Modern Love [1862], though the poem's wife commits suicide and his real won ran off with another man after 9 years. Happy second marriage. Also a novelist [The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859; The Egoist, 1879].
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was Dante R's younger sister. The Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Too religious to marry and wrote mostly devotional verse. Somewhat neglected.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was an alcoholic sado-masochist. Loved Shelley and followed him in his anti-clericism and support of continental freedom movements.
Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) a very minor Victorian poet, also a controversialist who favored national movements everywhere.
Robert Bridges (1844-1930) was much admired as a poet in his time, and was named poet laureate in 1913, but is probably more remembered now for his friendship with Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was raised a high Anglican and turned Catholic at Oxford in 1866 under the influence of Newman and the Oxford Movement. Entered a Jesuit novitiate in 1868 and ordained priest in 1877. His poems were published posthumously in 1918 by his poet friend Robert Bridges. Notable for his "sprung" rhythm, which counts only true strong stresses and allows any number of "outriders" (weak syllables). He loved Welsh poetry and also argued that he was reclaiming our Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a writer of romances (The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde [1886], Kidnapped [1886]). Also wrote verses, notably "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885).
Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) is usually known by his initials. An Early Modern in period, he is a late Victorian in his pessimism. Spent most of his life as a Latin professor, eventually at Cambridge, and published no book of poems between his first, A Shropshire Lad (1896), and Last Poems (1922), though his brother published More Poems (1936) posthumously.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) wrote much reflecting his time in India (The Jungle Book [1894], Kim [1901]) and won the Nobel Prize in 1907. Eliot said he wrote bad poetry but good verse, or something like that.