If the Romantics were alive today, who would they be?

It’s a question I’ve been mulling lately - partly because I’m gearing up for Movement poetry exam marking, mostly because I’ve been reacquainting myself with the unruly (and often uneven) brilliance of the Romantics.

You can always spot a Romantic.  They’re the heart-first thinkers who refused to believe that God or logic alone could explain the world.  The ones who turned away from convention and wrote about imagination like it mattered more than politics.

Which, for many of them, it did.

But what if they weren’t wandering the Lake District, downing laudanum nightcaps, or scribbling by candlelight in Italian exile?  What if they were writing now?

Because the Romantics asked questions that still feel sharp:

What if imagination matters more than conformity? What if art is protest? What if feeling isn’t weakness, but resistance?

They remind us that sometimes, revolution starts with a single line.

Blake: The Spiritual Agitator

When it works, it really works - and Blake’s poetry burns with outrage.  Not just at injustice, but at the systems that make people blind to it.  He didn’t trust institutions - not the Church, not the Crown, and certainly not the people who profited from maintaining the status quo.  He saw visions, wrote prophecies, and believed art should reveal truth.

Now?  Blake would be a multi-platform artist: street murals, collage, scathing Substack essays.  Think Banksy, but with more angels and fire.  He’d challenge the State, the Church, and the soul-sapping logic of consumerism - all while hand-pressing his own illustrated poetry books and then shredding them at auction.

William Wordsworth: The U2 of Romanticism

Young Wordsworth was the firebrand striding through revolutionary Paris, notebook in hand, flushed with radical hope.  He believed in liberty, in the people, in the promise of a new world. But when that world collapsed into Terror, he stepped back and not just from revolution, but from responsibility too.  He changed his political mind.  He came home and wrote about hedgerows, memory, and quiet walks.  Still sincere, but noticeably less dangerous.  (Byron, ever subtle, dubbed him ‘Turdsworth’.  I’ve spent more time than I should sniggering over this.)

Now?  If any modern artist captures that arc, it’s U2.  The early albums were raw and urgent, steeped in protest and political risk.  But somewhere between The Joshua Tree and the private jets and wraparound sunglasses, the edges softened.  Bono never stopped caring - just as Wordsworth never stopped writing - but the mood changed.  The boy who once shouted across barricades became the man performing orchestral remixes for Radio 2.

Earnest?  Yes.  Grand?  Still.  Revolutionary? …Not anymore.

Byron: The Beautiful Disaster

Byron was the original literary celebrity: brilliant, scandalous, endlessly quotable.  ('Mental masturbation' was his assessment of Keats - check his letter to John Murray in 1820, it gets worse.)  ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ was strategic branding.  But beneath the drama was a man writing about love, war, loss and identity with startling intimacy - and more humour than the rest of them put together.

Byron didn’t do quiet.  He wrote with fire, lived in scandal, and left England in disgrace - only to die fighting for Greek independence in a blaze of myth.  He was adored and reviled, brilliant and maddening, and always aware he was performing himself.

Now?  There were options: Taylor Swift for the self-mythology; Beyoncé for the power.  But I went with Russell Brand.  Hear me out.

Brand, before… charismatic, verbose, witty.  Addicted to performance and platform.  Once seen as dangerous, prophetic even (by some).  Then - just dangerous.

But here’s the thing: Byron died before the shine wore off.  He stayed golden.  Brand… didn’t. Which tells you something about how myths are made.  Also, there was always something unsavoury about Brand, and he was never as clever as he thought he was.  I would rather sit down for a bottle of the good stuff with Byron than Brand any day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Lyric Revolutionary

Shelley wanted to burn it all down - monarchy, Church, conformity - and rebuild the world through justice, poetry, and idealism.  He didn’t write poems so much as calls to arms disguised as verse.  Expelled from Oxford, exiled from polite society, he was unshakably convinced that imagination could undo tyranny.  His politics were loud.  His poetry was louder.  (Also, the story of his literal burning heart, snatched out of the pyre flames and wrapped in his elegy for Keats is pure Romantic excess - and true.)

Now?  Kae Tempest carries that flame (pun somewhat intended).  Their work moves across poetry, music, theatre, but always returns to the same truth: language can change people.  They write with urgency, vulnerability, and political force.  Like Shelley, they know that feelings are facts.  And that rhythm, breath, and fire can still move a crowd - and they’d both be equally at home as Artist in Residence on Radio 6 as guest-editing The Guardian.

John Keats: The Quiet Romantic

Keats wasn’t interested in overthrowing governments.  First he was cutting into bodies, trying to save lives (he actually had a real job, unlike the others).  Then he was too busy writing about beauty, love, and death - and about what it means to feel deeply in a world that doesn’t always make room for it.  He had a heartbreaking life and died young, his gravestone still reads, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’, he wasn’t one for self-aggrandizing.

Yet, despite his prolific output, he is the poet who left so much unsaid.  Yes, the juvenilia is just that, but the Odes are truly things of beauty that I come back to again and again, turning them in my hands like that Grecian Urn.  Say what you like, but Keats has a special place in my heart.

Now? Ocean Vuong picks up his mantle: intimate, lyrical, and deeply concerned with time, memory, and the body.  Both remind us that stillness can be subversive.