Contemplative, Intense, Pathos, Romantic literature, Romantic poetry, Self-reflection, Sturm und drang (storm and stress), Sublime

Some works of art effortlessly draw the core of their subject to surface. William Blake, the great predecessor to the Romantics, understood this well. Whether in a lyrical, allegorical poem like "The Echoing Green" or in the almost futuristic engravings for "The Book of Urizen," he exemplified the ar

18th century poetry, Lyrical, Pathos, Sensual, Sublime

In the unceasing rush of the modern world, everything conspires to prevent meditation, awareness, or faith in anything greater than the day's events. Much of contemporary poetry reflects the confusion of accelerated lives: Language poetry presents us with our dislocated selves, while the work of Ashb

Domestic, Modernist poetry, Pathos, Sensual, Visceral

Arthur Rimbaud made his way through language like some crazed channeler of unseen forces. As a Symbolist poet, Rimbaud scrambled the senses and his prose, forging a synesthetic wash of words sustained by their own momentum and internal sense. There is no clear form (he did not write sonnets); there's

Anxiety, Dark, Dissonant, Overflowing, Pathos, Surreal, Symbolist poetry