1. When I heard about the discovery of a long-lost Lord Byron poem, I immediately thought of The Aspern Papers, a great novella by Henry James about a scholar who learns that an ancient lady living with her neice in Venice was once the lover of romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern (who seems to have been based on Byron).

Mary Shelley was born Mary Godwin in London, England on August 30, 1797 to remarkable parents. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist when feminism was almost unheard of, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Her father, William Godwin, a well-known critic of the British government and the founder of modern philosophical anarchism, wrote An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793. Sadly, eleven days after Mary was born, her mother died of puerperal fever, leaving William Godwin to raise Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny.

Mary's father believed in the progressive type of education prescribed by philosophers like Rousseau, which emphasized experience over book-learning. He took Mary and Fanny on trips to different places and often invited writers, philosophers, and scientists to his house. These guests included Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One night Mary got to hear Coleridge recite his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to a roomful of guests. Mary was writing her own stories by the time she was ten years old.

When I think of Coleridge, I think of those momentary sparks of intuition I have experienced, when my brain seemed to grasp a clear and divine truth. It's like seeing something from the corner of my eye; when I turn to look more closely - it's gone! If others do not share this impression, that is all right, because subjectivity was a major tenet of the Romantic Movement, of which Coleridge was a founding member.

The Romantic Movement was, in part, a rejection of the cold logic that came from the Age of Reason. Romantics such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey emphasized emotion over reason, feelings over intellect. It was a return to spiritual, ephemeral realms of the imagination, often involving legends and heroes from ancient times. While their writing seems quite structured by today's standards, they were actually breaking away from the strict rules of verse prescribed by earlier poets.

The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, 1798-1837, was a contemporary of the great English Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats and Byron who lived in Italy, though he never had the chance to meet them. He was born in Recanati, a small town of the Marche region, then part of the Papal States.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge set out to write a poem describing an opium-induced dream he had, the result was Kubla Khan. Kubla Khan is a very mysterious poem; it describes a world not like any humans have ever known. A world where its hard to tell whether it's a place of beauty, full of calm and goodness, or whether it's a dark an sinister strange land. This poem shows the process of describing a dream on paper, something that is impossible to do, a lot like any creative process towards the middle and the end, the idea gets fuzzier and ultimately takes its own completely different form.

In the early 1800s there were a group of writers known as The Lake Poets. This was because they all lived in the "Lake District" in northwestern England. They are usually listed as a trio, but only two of them are really famous. The Lake Poets are: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Robert Southey. These poets were part of what was called The Romantic Movement from the late 1700s and early 1800s.

All our best men
are laughed at
in this nightmare land
--Jack Kerouac "Pomes All Sizes
Originated by art school friends William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, who called everything they hated 'slosh,' including Raphael's 'Transfiguration,' the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the Renaissance and embraced Medieval times. They were sick of the pretentious conventionality of theVictorian era. Like the Beat Generation writers in the 1950's, the Pre-Raphaelites--a hundred years earlier-- were rejecting the oppressiveness and cheap moralizing of their era. Pre-punk rogues and radicals, they were outside of society.

Born: 22 January 1788
Place of Birth: London, England
Died: 19 April 1824
Place of Death: Missolonghi, Greece

George Gordon Byron, better known as Lord Byron (the sixth Baron Byron, if you're counting), was nothing if not the prototype of the conflicted Romantic hero. His persona has influenced artists, from Beat writers to rock stars (think of dark dandies like Jim Morrison and Trent Reznor), possibly more than his art itself.