The Romantic movement
English Romanticism is associated with the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads, written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their contributions represent two complementary aspects of the movement: Wordsworth focuses on ordinary people, rural life and everyday nature, while Coleridge explores supernatural events and exotic settings, as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Wordsworth’s Preface to the 1800 edition presents poetry as accessible through ordinary language and ordinary subjects.
Wordsworth: nature and memory
For Wordsworth, Nature is more than scenery: it can offer an alternative to industrial towns, guide moral feeling and express a divine presence. His account of poetic creation combines intense emotion with later reflection. Through recollection in tranquillity, the poet recalls an emotion experienced earlier and shapes it into a poem. Memory is therefore central. Wordsworth also presents the child as especially close to Nature and God, while adulthood brings a loss of this harmony.
Keats and enduring beauty
- John Keats belongs to the second generation of Romantics. In Ode on a Grecian Urn, painted figures remain forever in the scenes represented: the young man never catches the girl, and the music never ends. The urn thus contrasts the permanence of art with human suffering, change and death. The poem’s closing statement, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” connects beauty with an enduring ideal.