I've set Byron's "Lines Inscribed On A Cup Formed From A Skull" to music. It works beautifully - it may as well have been written as a song. William Blake's "Mental Traveler" and Walter de La Mare's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" have similar rhthmic and rhyme structures, and all fit slow mournful English folk tunes.

I've also sang Blake's "Poison Tree" as a blues, repeating certain lines. I'm working on a version of Blake's "I Saw A Chapel All of Gold" to the fiddle tune Pigtown Fling. The Blake poem concludes with the protagonist vowing, shamefully, to go lie down with the swine, so there's a piggy connection between the two.

In fact many of John Clare and William Blake's poems work well as blues, if you repeat certain lines.

A couple of Keats' poems are very song-like. Try singing his "Fill for me a brimming bowl" to a country & western style tune. It's practically a C&W lyric anyway (turning to drink in despair over women).

I share bafflement with the poster above who couldn't understand how there could be a copyright owner for John Clare?! Because I have to know about this for my job (book publishing) I happen to know that if you are foolish enough to actually let a publishing house know that it is THEIR book you used as a source, then they would be legally entitled (in the UK at least) to demand royalties. They'd have a devil of a job, of course, trying to prove that you had indeed sourced the text from their book, even if you'd told them, as there are hundreds of editions of the works of most core English Lit poets....

My friend Caroline Weeks has recorded an album of musical settings of Edna St Millay's (spelling?) poems. It came out last year.