The Romantic poets wrote during a period of the late 18th to early 19th century. Most commonly known among English speakers are the British Romantic poets. While there were many poets that would fit the Romantic poets “framework,” generally the ones considered most relevant are William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron.

Though each of the Romantic poets had their own special qualities, they all had things in common. They triumphed the belief that nature and emotion were the places in which one found spiritual truth, a response to the “Age of Enlightenment,” poets preceding them. Most attributed to children special innate gifts, as Wordsworth stated, they come from heaven “trailing clouds of glory.” As well, they wrote poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of feelings,” again a Wordsworthian concept.

The Romantic poets particularly changed the way in which poetry was written. Many wrote in a style of free verse at times, moving away from the elaborate rhyming patterns of poets preceding them. The Romantic poets were also much more interested in triumphing the rights of women. Shelley was married to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose mother wrote one of the earliest and most celebrated feminist tracts, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Mary Shelley can be considered an important Romantic novelist of the period with her masterpiece Frankenstein.

Nature was of supreme importance to the Romantic poets. The idea of immersing oneself in the natural or beautiful, or in some cases the natural and frightening as in Blake’s The Tiger is distinctly Romantic. Blake contrasts the concept of the fierce burning tiger to his poem The Lamb which seems like a child’s nursery poem in its innocence and sweetness. When Blake inquires in The Tiger “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” he is essentially questioning the great mysteries of nature in its contrast of beautiful and fearsome.

It is difficult to pick just a few of the pieces that most resemble the Romantic poets as examples. However, a few examples can give one the sense of the variety of the Romantic poets as well as their sentiments.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is especially known for The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. William Blake is known for poems like The Tiger and especially for his collected works in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a fundamental work. However, many of his other poems are quite frequently quoted. Lord Byron’s narrative poems are greatly celebrated, including Childe Harold and Don Juan.

John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale are among his most well known works. Keats had a very short life, dying when he was 25. Literary critics often see this as a tremendous tragedy given his early potential.

Percy Bysshe Shelley also died quite young, at the age of 30. His most celebrated works include Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark.

Taken in sum, the Romantic poets may be seen as reactionary and humanist. They forever changed poetry, inventing new forms and influencing later poets. Nowhere is their influence felt more than in the American poets and writers of the mid 19th century. Many suspect the poetry of Walt Whitman, or the theories of Ralph Waldo Emerson could not exist without the influence of the Romantic poets.