Romantic Poets

Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted from 1800 to 1850, approximately,

In England the poet William Wordsworth was actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban, often eschewing consciously poetic language in an effort to use more colloquial language. Wordsworth himself in the Preface to his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798) defined good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", though in the same sentence he goes on to clarify this statement by asserting that nonetheless any poem of value must still be composed by a man “possessed of more than usual organic sensibility [who has] also thought long and deeply;” he also emphasizes the importance of the use of metre in poetry (which he views as one of the key features that differentiates poetry from prose). Although many stress the notion of spontaneity in Romantic poetry, the movement was still greatly concerned with the difficulty of composition, and of translating these emotions into poetic form. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent English Romantic poet and critic, in his On Poesy or Art sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”. Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of English Romantic poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create art, coupled with an awareness of the duality created by such a process.

Romantic poetry contrasts with neoclassical poetry, which was the poetry of intellect and reason, while romantic poetry is more the product of emotion. Romantic poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a reaction against the set standards, conventions of eighteenth century poetry. According to William J. Long, “The Romantic Movement was marked, and is always marked, by a strong reaction and protest against the bondage of rule and custom which in science and theology as well as literature, generally tend to fetter the free human spirit.”

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