Romantic Poetry

Romantic poetry gives distinctive importance to imagination, feeling, nature, and the experience of an individual voice. Wordsworth examines memory and perception through encounters with the natural world; Coleridge joins conversation and reflection to extraordinary narrative; Keats considers beauty, mortality, and the possibilities of art. Other national traditions develop their own relationships with history, song, and inherited stories. The movement contains differences of form and belief rather than a single philosophy. Its poems often turn a particular sight, sound, or remembered moment into a sustained inquiry into what can be known, valued, or preserved.