A reference page on Robert Burns, the national bard of Scotland and forerunner of the British Romantic poets.
A reference page on William Blake, visionary poet and artist who created his own mythology, wrote epics and children's rhymes, and made illustrated books that are admired icons centuries after his death.
Hie thee to the giant
Blake hypermedia archive, a vast, searchable, hypermedia collection of his illuminated books sponsored by the Library of Congress... or yr a Sick Rose.
For its Blake exhibition in late 2000, Britain’s Tate Gallery produced this great interactive exhibit,
William Blake Online, with mp3 recordings of the Songs, a guide to Blake’s London, a dictionary of characters in his personal mythology, a game of amazing facts & a downloadable “teacher pack.”
David Erdman's edition at the University of Georgia has
everything and an
e-concordance too, so you can search for lines & phrases from any of Blake's works & see them in context. Here, too, is a special
graphical hypertext edition of
Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Blake's beautiful illuminations were naturally among the first works marked for reproduction on the Web & this electronic conference/mailing list is one of the longest-running literary discussion lists, begun in 1993 (although the
archives only go back to 1995).
Fascinating browsing in the Web catalog from the University of South Carolina's special exhibition of Burnsiana in honor of the bicentenary of his death includes
this page of chapbooks (even then the avenue for popular distribution of poetry) &
this page of song collections (including the bawdy lyrics of
The Merry Muses).
An early exemplar of the Romantic poet (
his biography includes childhood poverty & extravagant dreams, a faked suicide note, poems passed off as the work of a 15th century monk & the emblematic starving poet's garret), Chatterton committed suicide at 17, but is still remembered.
Alexander Huber's
Thomas Gray Interactive Online Commentary is an excellent medium for study, with lots of biographical & background information as well as a collected of annotated texts that promises to keep growing as visitors to the site add their own notes.
A profile of Jupiter Hammon, actually the first African-American poet whose work was published (despite the often repeated claim that it was Phillis Wheatley), written for About Poetry by George Wallace.
Pope was a 17th century satirist, master of the heroic couplet & translator of Homer. Visit
The Rape of the Lock home page for everything you ever wanted to know about that poem, or read excerpts from
The Dunciad, Book IV in the University of Toronto’s
Representative Poetry Online archive.
America’s first black poet, Phillis Wheatley came from West Africa to New England as a slave, learned English, Greek & Latin, was the toast of the town in Boston when her first broadside was published, & died alone in a boarding house at 31.
