A classic poet with an even/musical meter?

Question

For a music composition project, I'm looking for a classic, fairly romantic poet whose verse & meter tends to be very even and musical. Any suggestions? I'm really enjoying the reading the works of the great poets, but there's just too much - I'd be reading for years!

Poe and Carroll are unfortunately out - Just too many settings of their work already. (Although I love them both.)

Answer 1

I agree with the choices of Keats and Donne, and Donne has stuff OTHER than Sermon XVII that is rhytmic.  Is Frost too contemporary?  Shakespeare's sonnets are fairly perfectly iambic and Blake is very rhymic too.

Answer 2

Just a thought, but.....

What about the two greatest Romantic poets, Shelley and Keats?

Thomas Gray springs to mind, especially his most famous work, Elegy in a Country Churchyard.

To set "Never send to know", etc, in a wistful, regretful, but NOT Minor scheme sounds like a challenge.

Marlowe would be fun, as long as you mean Christopher and not Phillip.

Although.....setting Chandler's rather rhythmic prose to music does sound intriguing.

If any, or all, of these ideas have been done to death, forgive me. I know virtually nothing about composition.

Answer 3

Check out some Chaucer - in the Canterbury Tales, he rhymes, making the poetry very rhythmic and readable. The thing is - it is old english, so you can use the original script (which is beautiful, but hard to read), or get a modern translation that keeps the rhyme scheme. Chaucer's writing can be funny, or romantic, or reminiscent, or jubilant; he is very accessible to many readers.

If Chaucer doesn't float your boat, I would try something written in iambic pentameter. Shakespeare was a master, but there are certainly other poets who employed this metric scheme. You will find some good info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pent...

Good luck with the project - it sounds like fun!