Title: Romanticism: background, main features, Romantic authors from Crossref-it.info
Headings: Romantic poetry
Romantic poetry
Background
Reaction to earlier age
Main features
Who were the Romantics?

Content: An emphasis on emotional and imaginative spontaneity
The importance of self-expression and individual feeling. Romantic poetry is one of the heart and the emotions, exploring the ‘truth of the imagination' rather than scientific truth. The ‘I' voice is central; it is the poet's perceptions and feelings that matter. An almost religious response to nature. They were concerned that Nature should not just be seen scientifically but as a living force, either made by a Creator, or as in some way divine, to be neglected at humankind's peril. Some of them were no longer Christian in their beliefs. Shelley was an atheist, and for a while Wordsworth was a pantheist (the belief that god is in everything). Much of their poetry celebrated the beauty of nature, or protested the ugliness of the growing industrialization of the century: the machines, factories, slum conditions, pollution and so on.