Jane Austen's Favorite Poets

When we think of Jane Austin, we sometimes forget that she was not only a keen reader of novels and a very keen observer of human nature, she was also a devoted reader of poetry. And in celebration of her 250th birthday on December 16th of this year, 2025, uh the students on vers community are studying her novel Sense and Sensibility, which is a novel that is very poetry aware. And that's one of the reasons why I chose it because we are close readers of poetry on verse, but we are also close readers of novels. And I've found since we started this course and I've always had this this conviction that the best readers of novels happen to be very good close readers of poetry and it's it's amazing to see that in the discussions we're having.

So you know one great example of from this book is Maryanne Dashwood who is obsessed with the poets of sensibility. Austin too was very clearly aware uh and read much poetry in her life. So, in this video, I thought I'd share with you the top four poets in Austin's library. And for a slightly longer list, you can read my Substack essay on the subject uh linked below, but I'm only going to give four in this in this video, the top four.

So, her novels really do live within and draw energy from these worlds of poetic culture, uh, of of sensibility, of the emerging romantic movement. So, let's explore some of Austin's favorite poets. Uh, the ones she read, the ones she loved, the ones she joked about, the one she mentioned sometimes in her novels. And these poets, uh, I think really do reveal something crucial about Austin's imagination.

We really do have a separation between novel readers and poetry readers. But really we we need to to have both poetic literacy and fiction literacy to really get the whole picture uh and appreciation for Austin. These poets, these four are going to help us see her as a novelist who draws uh portraits uh who's very attuned to rhythms uh to ironies and satire of course but also to the passions of the human heart and the moral truths of poetry which is something that was very important in the 18th century. So let's let's go in ascending order of importance.

So poet number ...