John Keats, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Percy Bysshe Shelley- Which poet do you regard as the greatest?

Question

Among the four. And why?

Answer 1

Oh, yes, Keats--without a doubt. I agree with Mistress Quickly. I discovered how great he was when I was nineteen--and he converted me from becoming a history teacher to becoming an English teacher (with the help of the critics Earl Wasserman and Cleanth Brooks, who showed me the depth of this thinking and the elegance of his writing).

Shelley's scandalous life was more interesting than his poetry. Tennyson lived the longest and wrote the most, especially long poems, but they do turn out to be Victorian, don't they? Browning's dramatic monologues are stupendous, and his Ring and the Book is a much neglected masterpiece. He'd be my runner-up. But you just can't beat the achievements of young John Keats.

Even though he died before he reached the age of 26, I don't think you can think of a poet with more titles that could easily be listed among the top 100 British poems.

Just look at this list--sonnets, odes, a ballad, romantic narratives:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (1816)
When I have fears that I may cease to be (1818)
The Eve of St. Agnes (1819)
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art (1819)
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (1819)
Ode to Psyche (1819)
Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)
Ode on Melancholy (1819)
Ode on Indolence (1819)
Lamia (1819)
To Autumn (1819)

One when he was 20 or so, and the rest in just one year.

And all that while he was grieving the loss of a brother, struggling with the executor of his family's estate, dealing with critics who derided his work as of the "Cockney school," and languishing over his unfulfilled love for Fanny Brawne!

And that doesn't count the two Hyperion poems, which showed him on his way to writing a great English epic.

Nor his critical theory (which survives only in his marvelous letters), including the incomparable definition of "negative capability," a way of poetry and a way of life.

And, if you've got any little kids around, you gotta read 'em the verse from his letter to his young sister Fanny while he was on his fateful walking trip through northern England. My kids grew up on this one. Here's just a part of it:

There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
For nothing would he do
But scribble poetry-
He took
An ink stand
In his hand
And a pen
Big as ten
In the other,
And away
In a pother
He ran
To the mountains
And fountains
And ghostes
And postes
And witches
And ditches
And wrote
In his coat
When the weather
Was cool,
Fear of gout,
And without
When the weather
Was warm -
Och the charm
When we chose
To follow one's nose
To the north,
To the north,
To follow one's nose
To the north!

OK, it ain't great poetry, but it shows a great poet who can still think like a kid.

This is the poet who in a year or so would give us lines like these:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone . . . .

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

* * *

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell . . . .

* * *

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain . . . .

* * *

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.


Oh, yes, and in our hearts.

Answer 2

I liked Robert Browning the best for the poem the Pied Piper. It was one of my favorites as a child.

Alfred Tennyson became a favorite later one. I never really got into either Keats or Shelley.

Answer 3

Keats, without a doubt. And the descending order of the others: Shelley to Browning to Tennyson. What Keats accomplished in his short life is a miracle of prolific artistry; had he lived to at least 40, even, he would probably be rated shoulder to shoulder with Shakespeare and Milton. (Thank you for being interested in genuine poetry; I am sick of seeing questions having to do with bogus writers.)

Answer 4

That's a really hard question -- I'd say Shelley, though. His poetry was beautiful and incorporated political & social themes to make his work important on many different levels.