[2][3] Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
[4] The poems of Lyrical Ballads intentionally re-imagined the way poetry should sound: "By fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men," Wordsworth and his English contemporaries, such as Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and William Blake, wrote poetry that was meant to boil up from serious, contemplative reflection over the interaction of humans with their environment.
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.
For Wordsworth and William Blake, as well as Victor Hugo and Alessandro Manzoni, the imagination is a spiritual force, is related to morality, and they believed that literature, especially poetry, could improve the world.
To define imagination, in his poem "Auguries of Innocence", Blake said: To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.
In his poem "The Tables Turned" he writes: One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
In '"Ode to a Nightingale", Keats wrote: ...................................................for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the leading romantic poet in this regard, and "Kubla Khan" is full of supernatural elements.
The philosopher Johann Georg Hamann is considered to be the ideologue of Sturm und Drang, with Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, H. L. Wagner and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger also significant figures.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also a notable proponent of the movement, though he and Friedrich Schiller ended their period of association with it by initiating what would become Weimar Classicism.
These thinkers were primarily concerned with the problems posed by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment and what was seen as the failure of the Analytic of the Sublime to accomplish the task set before it: bridging the gap between pure and practical reason.
Romanticism in Poland was a literary, artistic and intellectual period in the evolution of Polish culture, which began around 1820, coinciding with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz's first poems, Ballads and Romances, in 1822.
[10] Some other notable Polish romantic poets include Juliusz Słowacki, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Zygmunt Krasiński, Tymon Zaborowski, Antoni Malczewski and Józef Bohdan Zaleski.
An entire new generation of poets including Mikhail Lermontov, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet followed in Pushkin's steps.
Russian critics have traditionally argued that,during the 36 years of his life, Pushkin's works took a path from neo-Classicism through Romanticism and ultimately to Realism.
[14] Lord Byron was a major influence on almost all Russian poets of the Golden Era, including Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Delvig and, especially, Lermontov.
[16] Also, Miquel Costa i Llobera wrote the romantic poem The Pine of Formentor, one the most renowned works in Catalan poetry.
The important periodical Iduna, published by the Gothic Society (1811), presented a romanticised version of Gothicismus,[20] a 17th-century cultural movement in Sweden that had centered on the belief in the glory of the Swedish Geats or Goths.
[24] Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot of Romanticism, Whitman's poetry praises nature and the individual human's role in it.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is best known for his poetry and short stories, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole.
[26] He was one of the first American celebrities and was also popular in Europe, and it was reported that 10,000 copies of The Courtship of Miles Standish sold in London in a single day.
[27] However, Longfellow's popularity rapidly declined, beginning shortly after his death and into the 20th Century as academics began to appreciate poets like Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Robert Frost.
"[29] 20th-century poet Lewis Putnam Turco concluded "Longfellow was minor and derivative in every way throughout his career [...] nothing more than a hack imitator of the English Romantics.
However, all of these poets are generally identified with more recent movements -- as feminists, Harlem Renaissance writers, modernists, et cetera -- and only indirectly linked with Romanticism by their critics.
Moreover, as Heidi Thomson mentioned in her article, Why Romantic Poetry Still Matters, "The more literate and articulate we are, the better our chances for survival as citizens and inhabitants of the earth".