This study will examine three poems by English poets of the Romantic period: William Blake's "The Tyger," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," and William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud." The study will examine the basic principles of Romanticism and show how each poem upholds those principles. Although the three poets demonstrate different levels of intensity and different approaches to reality, all three fall within the Romantic mantle in their emphasis on nature and the imagination as expressions of a deeper reality. The Romantic poets, as Scholes et al. write, tended to be "transcendental in their philosophy, seeing nature as symbolic of the Creator's presence, and natural creation as analogous to the lesser creations of imaginative human beings" (Scholes et al. 606). Cuddon notes these features of Romantic poetry:
an increasing interest in Nature, and in the natural, primitive and uncivilized way of life; a growing interest in scenery, especially its more untamed and disorderly manifestations; an association of human moods with the "moods" of Nature; . . . increasing importance attached to . . . the power of the imagination; a tendency to exalt the individual (Cuddon 588).
Blake's "The Tyger" clearly qualifies as Romantic poetry, relying on the power and wonder of nature to carry his spiritual message. Blake uses the great orange-and-black striped beast to stand for the mysterious and threatening might of nature in the form of a wild animal. The first four lines of the poem introduce the image of the tiger in relation to the maker of the tiger, or God, the "immortal hand or eye" (3). The tiger does not stand alone, representing nature, but rather is made to call to mind the Creator of the creation and all of nature. The poem is nothing but questions about the Creator behind the tiger, rather than a dogmatic argument about what or who God is or is not. The "fearful symmetry" of the tiger's markings which a...