One of the elements of the Romantic Movement in literature was the elevation of Nature as a subject not only for poetry but for study, for life, and as a source of philosophy. This element is seen in different forms in the works of different artists. Romantic poetry such as that by Wordsworth, for instance, takes a more realistic and naturalistic view of Nature than does the more other-worldly sense of Nature found in Coleridge. Each poet features Nature, creates images of the natural world, and makes a connection between human life and the world of nature. This point of view is partially a product of the Enlightenment and of a more human-centered conception of the universe. A comparison of some poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge shows how different poets reacted to the new world-view.
The Romantic period in English literature is usually considered to extend from 1798, when Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads, to 1832, when Sir Walter Scott died (Abrams et al. 1-3). The old regime in England took its stand in the face of revolutionary fervor based on the American and French Revolutions. For those who sympathized with the Revolution, they needed a new revolution directed against reason and toward something else, and that "something else" was imagination (Adams 363). Romanticism was a movement marked by a shift in feeling, a shift in sensibility, as well as a new concept of man's relation to the natural order and to Nature in particular. As with most movements, the perception that a group of poets exhibited this sort of shift in sensibility is something imposed after the fact by critics reading the works of Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, among others, and finding that many of their sentiments and responses demonstrate a similarity in outlook different from the previous age. Romanticism was marked by certain attitudes, among them the following: 1) a growing interest in Nature and in the natural, primi...